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Media Organizations Join Forces to Fight Canadian Ruling
csaila writes "Some of the world's big media outlets (including CBC, CNN, Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, Reuters, and -- as well as Amazon, AOL, Google and Yahoo) are appealing a Canadian court ruling threatening both free speech and the Net. The ruling stems from a former UN employee who successfully sued the Washington Post in Ontario for libel, arguing that because the Post's Web site carried the story. his reputation had been "damaged" in that province."
The newspaper moved to have the case dismissed and argued that if it were allowed to proceed in Ontario, any news organization could be sued anywhere over material posted on its website.
Their defense doesn't appear to be "What we posted that got him fired was truthful", but rather that if you allow the lawsuit to proceed that you could hold anyone responsible for what they post on the Internet anywhere in the world.
On the one hand, how do you protect true speech if someone who posts it can be sued everywhere in the world, but on the other hand how do you protect everyone in the world from people posting false speech?
I'm a big tall mofo.
The post didn't malliciously lie about this guy. They didn't decide to go after this man by destroyin his reputation(like the McCarthy trials). There was, at the time, some proof that he was involved in illegal activities and the post reported on it. By your exact logic, President Bush could sue almost every media outlet in the world(especially those that post online) because of those false documents about his military record or OJ simpson suing every news outlet that called him a murderer.
People shouldn't have their hands tied from reporting based on the facts available. Its why we call them reporters and not detectives. I hope this gets struck down simply because if we want to have a society where we are kept up to date we have to allow for these people to report based on bad information once in a while. As long as it wasn't meant to crush the man's reputation out of spite, its fair game(ie. they had a good reason to believe at the time of reporting that this is true).
Now I will say it would be the responsibility of the Post to probably directly link to that article another article about how he was found not guilty of the crime. But I won't say they need to actually be 100% certain every time they report something that every fact is accurate.
This ruling does not say that you can be sued in Canada for posting something on your website in New York. It says that the Washington Post can be sued in Canada... because they do business there!
If your company does business in a country, it should be suable in that country. Freedom of the Press should provide protection under the substantive law of a country... but it just goes way too far to give complete protection from any jurisdiction.
Basically, the Washington Post wants a sort of diplomatic immunity for the press... which is absurd.