Site Supposedly Sued For Just Linking To A Story That Potentially Libels Someone
from the oh-come-on dept
On Friday, we wrote about a guy who worked for the Green Party in Canada who was
suing a whole bunch of sites, claiming libel. The problem was that he was suing sites like Google and Wikipedia for what its users had done -- rather than the users themselves. In our comments, people pointed out that he's apparently also sued Yahoo, MySpace and PBWiki (
though, we haven't seen anything to back that up Update: I've now seen the documents showing the claims against Yahoo and MySpace). The original story about this was in
The Globe and Mail, though plenty of other sources picked up on it as well. One was the site P2Pnet.net, where Jon Newton wrote up a blog post
about the lawsuits... and 15 minutes later
was sued himself. Yikes. Newton notes that the only thing he did in his post was
link to the potentially libelous post, which hardly seems worthy of getting sued yourself. Reporting on a libel suit doesn't seem like it should make you liable for libel as well. Once again, all this is really doing is getting a lot more attention focused on this guy rather than hiding his critics. It's difficult to see how that's helpful.
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Sounds like he's never heard...
Chris.
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The US isn't perfect, but it got quite a few things right.
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Streisand Effect
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Re: Streisand Effect
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Evolution
although.... most of them work hard to maintain the status quo. and they cause more suffering and death than mass murderers.
i believe less than one percent of them actually do what is right.
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BS
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Re: BS
"Literally 15 minutes..."
then goes on to say;
"..and since it's Saturday, I'll have to wait until Monday before I'll be able to do anything about this new suit."
So this guy LITERALLY got served 15 minutes later...on a Saturday? Right.
Either he doesn't know the meaning of 'literally', is lieing, or this suit is from something else.
Come on!
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Re: Re: BS
Welcome to web 2.0 - real-time litigation, delivered by a squad of lawyer avatars in Second Life.
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Re: Re: BS
or...you should think twice before commenting...nobody (including the guy) is claiming he got sued for what he posted 15 minutes prior to being served...
In fact, 15 minutes would be amazing any day of the week....in 15 minutes, the politician read the article, drummed up his lawyer, had him file the petition, had it processed and served to the guy...that would be truly amazing...just a few thoughts that might (should) have gone through your head before you make a fool of yourself
Come on!
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Re: Re: Re: BS
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It's Not What You Think!
Even in Canada, you can't get "sued" in 15 minutes. The lawyers wouldn't make enough money on the paperwork, photocopying, telephone calls to their mothers and/or girlfriends/boyfriends/goats/sheep, whatever.
You can now forget about this lawsuit for many years while all the lawyers pad their bills.
Oh yes, the results of lawsuits in Canada are usually a bit different from the results of lawsuits in the U.S. Even if this jackass wins, it wouldn't be unusual for the jury to award $1.50 or some other appropriately small amount.
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