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Canadian Court Reverses Net Publication Ruling

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bad-precedent-dismissal dept.

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."

4 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fire the Judge by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Overqualified.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  2. Re:Jurisdiction by badfish99 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It is usually a requirement of extradition that the offence be illegal in the country being extradited from, as well as the country being extradited to. Otherwise, everyone would get sent to Saudi Arabia for flogging every time they took a drink.

    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.

  3. Re:Fire the Judge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Jurisdiction - not even that complex by Dashing+Leech · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "I think just the fact that someone in Germany can access your article was the problem here."

    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.