Defamation, Free Speech, Jurisdiction and the Net?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm writing a legal article on jurisdiction and defamation via the web. There seems to be a trend in various national courts (eg the UK, Australia, Malaysia) to treat the place where a web-page is *read* (ie browsed) as the place of publication of its contents, regardless of where the page or the server serving it are located. This has far-reaching ramifications, as it opens up anyone publishing anything on a web-site (and also Usenet) in America to the more restrictive domestic laws of other countries -- not just for slander/libel/defamation, but also treason, lese-majestie, hate speech and general censorship laws (think Yahoo and France). Does anyone have personal, practical experience of being threatened by foreign governments or government bodies for material put up on the Net? Or is it just an inevitable consequence, to be overcome by geographical tagging of a browser's location (think icravetv.com) or similar measures?"

"Many people assert that informed Netizens see this as a way of fragmenting the Net, of imposing geographic boundaries and destroying part of the fundamental location-agnostic nature of the web and the Net -- ie, that it's a Bad Thing. Is this really so? Does anyone see this as a good, or at least a neutral, thing?"

Comments

Non-U.S. laws more restrictive?

[anothy]

this is slightly off-topic (mod away), but i note the assumption that non-US laws are inherently more restrictive than US laws. this is increasingly not the case. note DMCA and USA-Patriot, among others, and recent high-profile cases of foreign nationals being arested in the U.S. for breaking such laws.
mind you, i think your assumption was true a decade ago, and i'd like to see it be true again...

You've got it the wrong way round.

[Jens]

"as it opens up anyone publishing anything on a web-site (and also Usenet) in America to the more restrictive domestic laws of other countries"

This should read "as it opens up anyone publishing anything on a web-site (and also Usenet) to the more restrictive domestic laws of America". See DMCA for example (USA only).

Sigh. Why do so many Americans just blindly assume everyone else is behind. Yes, there are countries for which this is true. But there are also many for which the reverse is true.

So, to be more specific you could kill the "in America" in the sentence above and would even be more true: Also web pages on other countries could be subjected to more restrictive laws in again other countries.

Right? Yeah, I'll stop nitpicking now.