Legal Threat Demands Techdirt Shut Down

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this month, the US approved a new law to fight against so-called 'libel tourism,' the practice of suing US companies in foreign jurisdictions (quite frequently, the UK) which do not have the same level of free speech protections. The new law, the SPEECH Act, may now get put to the test, as lawyers for a guy named Jeffrey Morris in the UK, who was upset about some comments on a 2004 blog post on Techdirt, have demanded the entire site shut down due to those unidentified comments."

Comments

Re:So much for...

[dyingtolive]

There's not much else I prefer in all honesty, but you guys got freedom of speech down cold.

Well, long as it's not more than four words from a lyric out of a RIAA owned song.

Jeff Morris

[Hatta]

Is a fucking asshole.

Different motives involved here

[paiute]

"It is entirely possible that the lawyers were unaware of the SPEECH Act, but it does seem like a law firm making legal threats in a foreign country should be expected to have researched the legal barriers to making such a claim before using billable hours to make threats they cannot back up."

The law firm doesn't care if their threats are stupid:

Client: I want to sue!
Attorney: Well, you don't have grounds and probably can't win.
Client: I don't care! I want to sue!
Attorney: Okay. (Now with a clear conscience, turns on the clock.)

As much as I dislike the UK system

[jd]

I dislike the US trying to tell the UK what Constitution it should have, particularly as the US has actively condemned any interference by other nations in the US' legal system. (Including, I might add, efforts by the UN to prevent a Mexican being executed. Seems to me the death penalty is just a tad more severe than the UK's libel system -- even after factoring in listening to the lawyers.)

I doubly resent this clamp-down because the US has profited greatly from countries like the UK exporting civil cases to the US where the US' laws would be better for the plaintiff. Indeed, the US actively encourages lawsuit tourism when it is the money-maker. I'm sorry, but double standards don't wash.

If the US wants to impress anyone with this effort, then it must cut both ways. If they want other nations to respect US Constitutional rights, the the US has to respect its international obligations as well. That includes not letting the RIAA order "DeCSS Jon"-style stormtrooper action, not pressuring India to drop all action against American companies over Bhopal, not pressuring other nations to come up with bogus charges against people like the owner of Wikileaks, honoring the warrant against the 22 CIA agents in Italy for kidnap, etc. Further, if they want cases that are fundamentally American in nature to be heard in America, they must prohibit cases that are fundamentally the property of those nations to hear those cases.

The reality is, we know damn well that the US won't ban foreign lawsuits and will continue to infringe on the sovereignty of other nations. As, indeed, will all other nations. It's not uniquely a US problem. However, just considering the US, it is insanity to have these kinds of one-way barriers. That infringes on freedom far more than the libel cases ever did, especially given the sheer magnitude of some of them. (Any one of the ones I noted are way worse than all of the libel cases exported from the US combined.)