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Cyberlibel Damages Awarded In Canada
mszeto writes "The Globe And Mail is
reporting that an Ontario judge has awarded an archaeologist 125k$ in damages after someone smeared her using email. According to the lawyer: 'People seem to think there is a level of anonymity to e-mail and the Internet. And that it's a lawless area. And clearly it is not, nor should it be.'"
SMTP headers can be forged. Windows machines can be 0wn3d. Any Tom, Dick, or Vladimir can set up a rogue SMTP server, claim to be Yahoo! mail, and start spewing email.
You can't nail someone to the wall until you have a means to prove that they did what you claim.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I don't see anything at all controversial about this ruling.
Photos.
I think that "cyberlibel" punishments are wrong for one very simple reason:
It is exceptionally easy to frame someone. I could easily send you an email with a return address of Bill Clinton. It's as easy to forge as the return address on regular mail. If someone claiming to be me went and slandered a bunch of people, should I be punished? Absolutely not. That is why this sort of thing should not be allowed until we have a reliable method for tracing emails (which we almost certainly never will.)
**This begins my ever-changing sig
We need a -1 RTFA moderation option!
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While the article really diden't delve into any of the facts, I was able to glean that they just sued some poor guy for all his money. The article then mentioned some legal victory of suing a homeless guy for insulting a corporation. I think this really just shows that you are only safe in the legal system from slanderous comments if you have money to back you up, if you are poor, Internet or not, you will be f'd sans reach-around.
If the "alleged" author actually admits to writing the e-mail, then cyber-libel becomes regular, boring, plain-ol' libel.
This article doesn't give us enough detail.
However if you are being "framed" it should be trivial for even the most junior of lawyers to cast enough resonable doubt on the e-mails authenticity.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
So don't get your shirt in a knot. All the ruiling did was establish that, yes, if you can show beyond a reasonable doubt that John Smith sent the message, "It was just the internet" is not a reasonable defence against Libel charges.
The internet is NOT immune to law, this person was libeled, and proved it in court. The judge did as he would do in any other libel case and awarded damaged to the victim, just because this is involved the internet does not make it any different to any of the other thousands of cases that go on each year in courts around the world.
Now, people will say 'oh, but email is notoriously unreliable for purposes of tracking down the origionator', but in most cases that isnt true. You can track email back to the server that sent it, and in this case the victims lawyer managed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this message origionated from the defendant. And the fact that the defendant didnt even bother turning up to defend himself isnt a plus point in my humble opinion.
Don't mod parent down, (s)he was trying to be funny in referring to the notation of the dollar amount as "125k$" compared to the american notation, "$125k".
I've been allocating a bit of my thinking time to internet phenomina like this and something recently occured to me: The internet (to me) seems like the perfect rendition of communisim... Not evil, McCarthy communisim, but rather the way it's supposed to function; it's adacemic, ideal form.
Everyone is the same. There is no perceived rule over the information that flows through it. Heck! even the physical infrastructure that makes the internet possible is just a suggestion; a group of standards that people aggree upon to make things work properly. I enjoy imagining a society not unlike the matrix, where I can patch in and exist in a digital way (I guess you can already, but this would be more profound) I would have millions of other people in the same universe, no rules, no private economy, just suggestions to live by... Look at how well it works right now... there is no problem with the internet asside from the fact that it interferes with life in the (excuse yet another matrix allusion) "real world"
I sincerely hope that someday, this generation will be able to experience something akin to Neil Stephenson's "Metaverse" in his CyberPunk novel: Snow Crash... Damn cool stuff if you ask me!
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
The problem with spam is not that people might buy the product. The damage to me has nothing to do with that. It's the time I waste and the bandwidth I pay for that they steal. It's also the fact that spammers are the money behind most of the viruses, spam relays bots, etc, which are jamming the web and costing us billions of dollars. A lot of the large cyber-criminal organizations got their start by working for large spam operations.
And stuff like the Nigerian scam is a crime. The letter itself is evidence of fraud, if they can catch those that sent it.
Yep. Both Canada and the UK have ridiculous defamation laws; bring that up the next time a Canadian or Briton sneers at the American legal system.
So, at least in the UK, maybe not such a good idea.
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Do we need to cyberinvent new cyberterms whenever an event occurs that has to do with computers?
-b
myselfmusic
...and did it occur to you that the entire concept of "framing people" is not new to the justice system? That we have standards of evidence and guilt? Granted the case was in Canada, but in the US, the burden of proof is quite high, at least in criminal cases- in civil cases, it's lower, but you've still got to prove well beyond, on average, what one of us would consider good enough proof.
It's one of the reasons computer crimes are hard to prove, and I think the system has dealt with it quite well. Methinks you've been watching Hackers too much.
Please help metamoderate.
Lying about someone and smearing their image is libel in Canada? We call that "Politics" here in the states.
Considering that defamation in the form of libel/slander is defined as "issuance of a false statement about another person, which causes that person to suffer harm" I don't see how that could be the case. There are perhaps jurisdictions where saying harmful but true things are actionable but those are, by definition, not libel/slander.
Considering the amount of made up information regarding canadas laws in that respect, could you please point me to the part of the legal code where that is the case?
I don't remember seeing anything to that effect in the laws I've read first-hand regarding the truth. In fact, the laws I recall give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and say that if there's reason to believe that they thought they were speaking the truth in good faith, they're still off the hook.
It's been a long time.