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Simon Singh Talks With Wired About His Libel Battle
smellsofbikes writes "Wired has a short but pithy interview with Simon Singh about his defense against a libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association, in which he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious."
It would seem that if he emerged victorious, the other side should have to cover the $200K -- plus something for his time.
You forgot economics.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I happen to know a few people who are really.. well, they love Jesus more than most. They seem to attack science, not to learn anything, but to merely shoot down their "adversary".
I really wish those people could understand this quote (last 2 lines of the article): "People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth."
Yeah - a victory that cost him $200k of his own money - so that he doesn't have to issue a retraction or pay even more of his own money.
Or, maybe if he is lucky he might get reimbursed some or all of it - quite some time after having spent it. Of course, he won't get any interest on the money or anything like that. Most ordinary people would lose their homes in the process of trying to pay these kinds of fees, and I'm sure courts would not reimburse those costs either.
That will teach them!
Europe at least is far better than the US in this regard, but I'd go a step further. I'd envision a system where when a suit is brought a court would require an escrow of funds from the plaintiff if they had greater than a certain amount in assets. Regardless, the attorneys would be paid by the court (for both parties) - it would be illegal for attorneys to receive money from their clients. The fee rate would be set by the court, and the budget for both parties would be the same, and the budget would be based on the nature of the case and the amount at issue. Both parties would then battle it out in court or settle. Individual participants (whether defendents, plaintiffs, witnesses, or jurors) below a certain income level (moderately high) would also be paid by the court a per-diem based on their annual income. In the end the court would assess the loser of the case for the amount of court costs (which now includes all client legal costs and the cost of the time of all parties as well), plus interest sufficient to ensure the government comes out at least even. This would be a public debt that the government would have the power to collect on.
This would ensure that merely being sued would have no negative financial impact on somebody, and that people will think twice before filing frivolous lawsuits. People who are out time and money also don't have to try to badger the other party to pay - the government would pay them as they incur costs, and now the government can use all its usual methods to recoup its loss just as if the losing party didn't pay their taxes/etc.
The bottom line is that the court system needs to stop punishing people (effectively) merely for being sued.
The cost isn't a signifier of importance. It is a repudiation of a self-serving system of law that punishes innocent people by forcing them to outlay large sums of money to protect themselves from rapacious litigants. When faced by a wealthy opposition, those of lesser means very often have to cave in and accept defeat simply because they have no means of defending themselves. Hopefully the loser-pays rules will be put to effect here but that doesn't justify the need to pay so much upfront for protection from the law.
FWIW. I knew who Singh was before this case came up.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
If nothing else, the story is that it costs $200,000 to defend against false libel claims in British courts. Remember, this isn't the criminal justice system where you have the choice of a state-appointed lawyer or spending the money on your own. If he hadn't spent the $200,000, he would have needed to bow down to every ridiculous demand of the the British Chiropractic Association, despite being obviously correct in what he says. Freedom of Speech doesn't mean freedom to lie arbitrarily about people. But it does need to include the freedom to critique. In England, that right does not exist.
We actually have laws on the books now in America specifically to protect Americans from being sued under the UK's ridiculous libel laws. It's a terrible system, and it has to change. That is the story.
The ______ Agenda
Amusingly enough, the US actually has laws protecting US Citizens from UK libel laws. IANAL, but in the US you need to show that the defendant was malicious or reckless, and the claimant has to prove that the claim is false. In the UK, it is on the defendant to prove that the claim is true.
So while the problem of buying justice in civil actions is true across the board, the UK is particularly egregious in this respect. Supposedly the UK government will propose a libel reform in March of next year, though details have not been forthcoming.
The ______ Agenda
Weather forecasting seems to work most of the time (at least well enough that I know what to wear and whether to carry an umbrella that day). Back when I lived in Cleveland, the snow predictions were eerily (and unfortunately) accurate to a reasonable enough degree. Since the arrival of doppler radar, it's become even more useful.
Considering that it's based on probabilistic models and no one is stupid enough to insist that it's based on magical crystal balls that always work :p, I'd say people are far too harsh on the poor ol' weatherman :p. And no, I'm about as far removed from the profession as anyone could possibly be - just stating facts.
Oh, and here's the obligatory "ha ha, that's funny" to forestall the inevitable "whoosh" from some drive-by moron (gawd those cretins are annoying :p).
This makes me very uncomfortable. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic, but the reason I believe it isn't just that somebody with a Nobel prize said, "global warming is real and anthropogenic." Authoritative scientists told us that margarine was better for us than butter; in that miscegenation laws were necessary for public health; and that electromagnetic waves were not quantized (Bohr's school said this) and that they were vibrations of a luminiferous aether (most textbooks said this, decades after Einstein published relativity). All of those claims turned out to be false. Some of them were extremely harmful to large numbers of people.
I teach physics at a community college for a living. The hardest thing to get my students to do is to think for themselves. Some come in already doing it, some will do it with encouragement, and others are incapable of doing it. Some will do it and come up with conclusions that I consider incorrect. But despite all these difficulties, we're far better off as a society if 10% of the population can think for themselves than we are if 100% accept authoritative opinions on faith.
Find free books.
Sorry... I hate seeing numbers thrown around as if it somehow makes this case more important than others. I'm glad to see that Simon Singh stood up for his comments and also that he is now extremely famous and has furthered his career by this episode.
You have that spectacularly backwards.
The number isn't thrown around to suggest this figure / this case is unusual, it's thrown around to suggest this is usual. Want to defend yourself? That'll cost you ~5 years of a typical wage, then. Suddenly caving in and "apologising" looks quite attractive after all, regardless of how strong you thought your principles were.
The whole reason he could afford to stick the course defending this is that he was already "rich and famous". By the time this kicked off he already had several best-selling books, a BAFTA award, Emmy nomination, an MBE and a fairly high profile career in print, radio and TV. I understand he may not be a familiar name across the pond, but within this country I struggle to think of many people in his field (science journalism / popular science) with a higher profile over the last couple of decades. Maybe Brian Cox, Patrick Moore, Ben Goldacre... it's really not a long list at any rate.
That's the whole point. If some fresh-out-of-grad-school science-interested junior journalist on £18k p.a. had written this, been sued, and faced a £100k bill, they would almost certainly have had to fold: science 0, legal bullies 1.
This man could have just retracted it and bought a Porsche but instead he used his "fame" and wealth to fight the case as a matter of moral principle, legal precedent, and a platform to explicitly draw attention to the general campaign for libel law reform. Snide insinuations he used the lawsuit for personal promotion are hardly fair.
Singh didn't actually win, the BCA dropped their case when they could see mounting pressure from the public, high profile intellectual celebrities and politicians. A huge difference in law. The last thing the fraudsters within the BCA want is a valid examination of their cure-all claims. The only good from this case is its high profile nature and possible UK libel law reform.
He did have the proof to back up what he said - that the treatments were bogus. I.e. there is plenty of evidence that they did not work (more accurately no evidence that they do better than a placebo). The original judge decided that "bogus" meant that the supplier was dishonestly lying about it too, and that was the libellous claim, and that is the appeal he won. In any case he probably could have won the argument as he could have shown that the Chiropracters ought to have known about the studies that showed the lack of effect, and if they did not they were negligent, and if they did they were dishonest. This however was a much tougher argument, with room for scope of argument on "dishonest". Notably the BCA had to issue warnings to members to remove claims from websites and literature as there were many making claims that could not be backed up.This suggests that he probably had a point anyway. The effect is now that many people will not speak out against treatments without any medical value and dodgy medical claims for fear of being sued - even if they win they lose a few years of their life and earnings.
Minor correction for you - be careful not to mix up "England" and "Britain", they are different things. There are "English" courts and English law but there are no such things as "British courts" or "British law". In Scotland, which is part of Britain, Scottish courts and Scots law prevails, a different legal structure exists. So we're talking about the situation in England here, not Britain.
cheers!
Simon Singh is an idiot if he thinks he can make libellous comments about the BCA *without having the proof to back up what he says*. There is the concrete defence against libel cases in the UK - be able to prove what you say. Simple.
1) The judges ruled that Sing's comments fell under 'fair comment', an expression of his opinion that was allowed under freedom of expression, whether or not what he said was actually true. See http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/350.html
2) The BCA was asked to show the evidence it had that Sing was wrong - ie. that chiropractors could treat common childhood illnesses. The evidence was examined in the British Medical Journal and found to be a load of crap - half the studies they cited had nothing to do with chiropractic, they misrepresented the conclusions of others and the remaining had basic methodological errors making them invalid: http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2766.full?view=long&pmid=19589818
So far from being an idiot Sing was proven completely right - not only he can make 'libellous' comments against chiropractic because of free speech laws but those comments were actually proven to be correct.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
Quote from Wikipedia:
The publicity produced by the libel action has led to a "furious backlash",[2] with formal complaints of false advertising being made against more than 500 individual chiropractors within one 24 hour period,[3][30] with the number later climbing to one quarter of all British chiropractors.[2] It also prompted the McTimoney Chiropractic Association to write in a leaked message to its members advising them to remove leaflets that make claims about whiplash and colic from their practice, to be wary of new patients and telephone inquiries, and telling their members: "If you have a website, take it down NOW." and "Finally, we strongly suggest you do NOT discuss this with others, especially patients."[2][3] One chiropractor is quoted as saying that "Suing Simon was worse than any Streisand effect and chiropractors know it and can do nothing about it."[2]
Linky.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Loser pays in the UK is not quite as simple as many people think. The definition of "loser" is usually based on whether any award was more or less than what was previously offered (and paid into the court) by the defendant. For example if the defendant offered to settle for 100k pounds and the judge awards damages of 99k pounds (less than was offered), then the plaintiff is considered the loser and has to pay the defendant's legal costs even though he was awarded 99k.
Furthermore, legal costs include the cost of the lawyers' time, unlike the USA.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
There is the concrete defence against libel cases in the UK - be able to prove what you say. Simple.
This isn't correct. Truth is not an absolute defence against libel under UK law (unlike, I believe, the US). You can be successfully sued for libel even if both parties agree that what you said was true.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
That's what statistics are for. Every single measurement needs not be wonderfully accurate. In the same way that we define a certain height as "sea level" when the surface of the sea isn't level, we can talk about average temperatures when we lack precise measurements at each point.
Unless you can demonstrate that this bias in thermometers has a trend towards showing higher temperatures as time goes by, you cannot say global warming is an artifact of measurement error.
Yes. This times a hundred. Times a million. Pseudoscience at best, dishonest at worst. I too am really glad he gives genetic engineering it's props, because anti-GMO really is the new anti-vax. Just because you can't be bothered to listen to a valid source doesn't mean that the people who know what the hell they're talking about are in some grand Monsanto/Shadow Government conspiracy to be evil. The scientific evidence is in. It's been it. The idea that they are inherently dangerous to human health is laughable (and growing even less plausible every day), they are a benefit for farmers, and they are a net positive to the environment. Deputing these facts without adequate information to go against them, which is what pretty much every anti-GMO group on the planet does, is not insightful or thought provoking, it's denialism, plain and simple. The modern controversy surrounding GMOs is is no longer a scientific debate, it's a popular one, largely with biologist, horticulturists, botanists, microbiologists, zoologists, toxicologists, geneticists, biochemists, and farmers on one hand, and people who think that an appeal to nature is a valid argument on the other, and even that doesn't make sense considering that we selectively breed crops for various mutations for thousands of years (as anyone who has even a passing understanding of corn genetics will tell you) and that the odds are pretty darn good that every plant we eat has picked viral, bacterial, and fungal DNA at some point, probably insect DNA too. Human DNA is at least 3% virus. We are, in a sense, genetically modified organisms ourselves.
Here's a good example: A few weeks ago, some anti-science arsonist assholes burned down a GMO grape test field in France. They were government developed, so the claim that they're against corporations doesn't apply. They were virus resistant, so the claim that they're against chemicals was out. They were rootstocks, and since roots don't produce flowers, their claim that they're afraid of cross pollination and wild GMOs is out. The health concerns, even if they had any merit to begin with, are also out, because again, the GMO part was only the root, not the grape. Why are they against them? Because they're GMO. They're against genetic engineering because it's genetic engineering. They've decided that genetic engineering is bad, and base everything else on that decision. They start with the conclusion, and make everything else fit that. Hundreds of studies showing they're wrong is part of the conspiracy, scientific consensus is part of the conspiracy, and every relevant expert who knows what they're talking about is in on it too, and therefore, anything that disagrees with their premise is easily dismissed, knowledge because a vice, ignorance a virtue.
This topic deserves more publicity than it gets, it really does. I think that this is a truly fascinating area (as a look at my comment history will reveal). I love plants and horticultural science, and I think it is just amazing what we can do with them now, what we might be able to do in the future. We are living in interesting and exciting times. We can increase output, decrease need for inputs, help preserve the soil and the environment. We can help the people who need it most grow more nutritious food. We can lessen or eliminate the problems caused by pests and diseases. Someday I might have a mango or cashew or cacao or coffee or lychee tree here in the northeast US. This is what people are really working on. This isn't sci-fi, it's real, and it is just a shame that we have people with all the intellectual integrity of your average homeopath attacking it and generally trying to influence the general population with cheap scare tactics. And it's almost funny, these people think they're being insightful when all they're going is displaying their own ignorance. It would be like someone claiming that the moon must be hollo
It's kind of a historical thing. Historically, Britons favor respect and propriety over the truth. Even if everyone knows the king is cheating on his wife, you don't say it in public, for example. As long as no one is getting hurt, there's no reason to make waves by pointing it out. Thus their historical custom is codified into law.
Here in America we're a bunch of redneck hicks who know nothing about respect and propriety. If we know some dirt about someone, we're going to say it, and we're going to say it loud. And our laws protect us.
Whether one way or the other is better is debatable, of course I prefer the American way, but there is an argument to be made for the British way as well.
Qxe4
This for some reason is at 5 interesting despite being completely wrong.
What happened was that at the original pretrial hearings the Judge struck out the defence of honest opinion, which would have been a defence against the BCA's claim of libel (not an absolute defence - if the BCA could establish that the opinion was based on malice then it could prevail).
What Simon Singh did win was the appeal against this judgement. Faced with the extemely strong likelyhood that Singh had a suitable defence the BCA withdrew.
He had an earlier win as well by winning the rigth to appeal after having it rejected twice.