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Canadian Court Reverses Net Publication Ruling
An anonymous reader writes "A Canadian appellate court has reversed
an earlier ruling that had media companies worldwide fearing an
Internet publication chill. A lower court had asserted
jurisdiction over the Washington Post based solely on an article
published years earlier that was available on the Post's website. That decision attracted the attention of companies such as Reuters and Yahoo!, who appealed what was viewed as a dangerous Internet jurisdiction case."
Overqualified.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The tendency of powerful countries like the US to believe that their law should apply everywhere is more troubling. This not only leads to cases like Sklyarov's, but also to pressure on other countries to make them change their own laws to fall into line: the various European versions of the DMCA come to mind here.
The logical end of this process would be for all laws to be the same everywhere (and to be the worst common denominator of all the current laws). The present diversity of laws between different countries is an important source of our current freedoms.
I'd rather have judges making bad decisions that can be fixed on appeal than the government having the power to arbitrarily remove judges they disagree with.
This remains the case. For the purposes of defamation, the relevant jurisdiction is that where the material was published in the legal sense of the word, meaning 'where it was communicated to a person other than the plaintiff'. The location where a matter is read or heard is the location at which that matter will be considered to have been 'published'
Thus it was held by the High Court (Gutnick v Dow Jones) that an American company (Dow Jones) publishing defamatory imputations about an Australian citizen, hosted on servers in the US, could nonetheless have action brought against it in Australian courts because the material was viewable by subscribers in Australia.
From the perspective of the legal thought underpinning the tort it makes perfect sense, but it seems somewhat at odds with a lay-person understanding of jurisdiction and the nature of international communication networks.
I think it was even a lot more complicated than that. In this case, the Washington Post slandered a person. That it was slander was not in question, and slander is illegal in both Washington and Ontario. The problem is slander is a law of circumstances, in which reputation is harmed. The person in question was not harmed in Washington has he had no reputation there, not having any friends, family, or colleagues. Even by Washington law, the harm happened in Ontario. There were a bunch of other contributing factors as well such as availability of witnesses. In essense, neither Washington nor Ontario seemed the right venue, yet that would allow the Post to get away with it.
This is not so much a internet jurisdiction problem as it is a general problem with laws in which the act happens in one location but the harm happens in another. This isn't new, and there's plenty of case law from telephone, mail, and so forth. It is an interesting problem with no easy answers though. The internet just makes it all the more common and visible.