Proposal For UK Libel Reform Fixes Many Problems, Leaves Plenty Of Others

from the it's-a-start dept

Wed, Apr 6th 2011 10:18pm — Mike Masnick

For years, we've covered the ridiculous libel laws in the UK that create a massive chilling of certain forms of speech. Thankfully, there's been a push to reform the law over the past couple years, and a draft bill has finally been introduced which appears to solve a lot of the problems with UK libel law, including limiting who it covers (to cut off crazy libel tourism cases) and reinforcing and clarifying "truth" and "fair comment" as defense, while adding an important new defense: "public interest."

That all sounds good, but it's not perfect. As Arthur Bright notes at the link above, the law still places the burden on the defendant. This is a bizarre facet of UK libel law. Whereas, in the US, the plaintiff first has to prove defamation, in the UK, it's more or less assumed to be true, and the defendant has to offer up one of the defenses in response.

The one thing that still irks about the new bill, at least from an American perspective, is that it still places the burden of a truth defense on the defendant. It still seems unfair and inefficient to put the burden of proving a statement's truth on the defendant when the plaintiff presumably has much easier access to everything they need to disprove the claim. Perhaps, with the changes the bill makes to strengthen 'fair comment' and tighten jurisdiction, the backwardness of the truth defense will not be as much of an issue. But I still worry about situations where a limited-resource defendant faces a super-wealthy corporate plaintiff - why should the poor village blogger have to prove the truth of a statement that the rich City executive ought to be able to disprove with minimal effort?

Hopefully this particular issue can be fixed in later drafts. On the whole, though, it's good to see the UK moving in the right direction on this.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: defamation, libel, reform, uk

7 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

mike allen (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 12:11am

About time but as you say more needs to be done.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
The eejit (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 12:25am

Well, as a Brit....
...anything is better than the current law.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2011 @ 1:12am

Regarding burden of proof, there are two ways to look at it. Let's say that someone in the U.S. and someone else in the U.K. both post on their blogs that you f**ked a dog. You sue them both for defamation. You win your suit in the U.K. if the defendant fails to prove that you f**ked a dog. You win your suit in the U.S. ONLY if you can prove that you have never, in your entire life, ever f**ked a dog. Good luck proving that.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2011 @ 2:30am

Although the libel laws in the UK are completely fucked up, I love it how you automatically think that we should be aspiring to have laws exactly like the US.

To the rest of the world the US is just a giant joke and hypocrite!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Jake, 7 Apr 2011 @ 3:15am

Re:
Colourfully expressed, but a cogent point. Questions of the burden of proof get very complicated when it comes to one side or another having to prove a negative, especially since libel cases can often come down to one person's word against another's.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
ethorad (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 4:52am

Re: Re:
Plus, although the plaintiff should have evidence that the comments are untrue (leaving aside proving negatives) the defendant should have a similar level of proof.

After all, if you don't have sources and evidence to back up your statements you would be well advised to word your comments appropriately.

Having said that - IANAL ...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
E. Zachary Knight (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 8:52am

Re:
While the US is not perfect, one can often look at another country's laws and see what works well and what doesn't. There is nothing wrong with that.

To Mike, US libel laws are in a better position than UK laws. To Mike US laws regarding copyright are a huge mess and should not be copied by other countries.

So with two examples, your argument falls flat on its face.
[ link to this | view in thread ]