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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 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!
**This concludes my ever-changing sig
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.
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.
I think that a pretty severe penalty is called for, for two reasons. First, the impact on Cheryl Ross was quite serious. Universities generally take such ethical issues very seriously. She could have lost her job and been made unemployable as an archaeologist. Furthermore, native bands are very sensitive about anything to do with human remains. Even an unproven allegation could have interfered with her ability to do research. In other words, this was not simply calling her a bad name; it could have ended her career. Secondly, according to the article Holley didn't just spout off in a moment of anger. He actually went to the trouble of falsifying evidence. In other words, what he did was premeditated and unquestionably dishonest. If somebody deliberately falsified evidence in an attempt to destroy your career, I bet you'd think they should pay a pretty severe penalty.