Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Supreme Court To Decide If Linking Is Publishing
An anonymous reader writes "Will Canada become a black hole in cyberspace? Or will it remain a country of which former prime minister Wilfred Laurier once said, 'Canada is free and freedom is its nationality.' According to p2pnet's Jon Newton, that'll be for the nine members of the federal Supreme Court to decide. Newton was sued by ex-Green Party of Canada financier Wayne Crookes for allegedly defaming him by linking to a story Crookes didn't like. Newton is now back home on Vancouver Island after traveling to Ottawa for the SCC hearing. Was it win or lose? It's an 'Epic Fail' for Crookes, Newton says. The Supreme Court reserved its decision. Its rulings are 'typically released six to eight months after a hearing,' according to the CBC in its report on the case. Says Ars Technica, 'As CIPPIC puts it, if Newton loses, the ruling could "chill hyperlinking which in turn undermines the communicative force of the Internet and deters innovation of new, expression-enhancing platforms that may not develop due to fear of defamation actions."'"
This could end Google in Canada
If the Supreme Court rules the wrong way, the decision won't stand.
Everybody from Google to Bell and Rogers will lobby heavily against this. This would certainly kill Google's business in Canada outright, seriously harm Microsoft through MSN/Windows Live and even result in less internet subscriptions for Bell and Rogers. Also, any Canadian news site would be doing a full court press against this. What's more, I don't see how any powerful companies would benefit from this wrong decision.
Rest assured that all these companies would lobby Parliament to change the laws so that this decision gets reversed.
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If they choose that to be the case, then they have to be consistent. Meaning the paper equivalency must also be considered publishing. So no more citing sources in essays.
Wherever the truth lies in this dispute, that initial linked p2pnet piece is horribly written and non-illuminating. There has to be a better story, not written by a six-year-old, that covers this case.
#DeleteChrome
It's like assembling a committee to determine if water is dry.
If I call the police and "link" them to the address of a burglary in progress, am I committing burglary?
Are the workers that install road signs which "link" bank robbers to the locations of the banks they rob guilty of robbery?
If a library's card catalog "links" a terrorist to a book on chemistry would not the librarians and publishers be guilty of terrorism?
If my website links to a page about ponies, and the domain is later transferred to a porn site, am I a then pornographer until I remove the link?
Did I just make Slashdot.org into the new PirateBay?
No, to imply linking is publishing is to imply responsibility for the content at the website published by somebody else. Also the link must divine the future as you would would also deemed to have published all future changes to the web site after having published the link to that site.
Also the judge would have to be clairvoyant in an ruling with regard to your intent when linking to the site and how carefully you perused the contents of the site you linked to.
Publishing a link is publishing the description to that link and the link itself, nothing more nothing less. Any judgement to the contrary represents a corrupt bias to achieve political change whether as a result of corporate of government intervention.
An example a 'hyperlink description' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink, I read the first paragraph so that it was loosely be on topic and take no responsibility beyond that, not for the remaining content nor any future changes to that content, for any judge to say that I published the content referred to in the link would be a sure sign of corruption on the part of that judge.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
what Canada decides?
reading that again it sounds like flamebait, sorry. What I mean is that the internet is an international phenomenon and while Canada or Nicaragua or whoever can decide whatever they want, most web sites and or businesses on the web are not fixed to a physical location. It's like raising corporate taxes. Companies will just go elsewhere or declare that they are doing X thing elsewhere where it is legal/cheaper.
Most of the media is making the point of the lawsuit solely about linking. The important point in the lawsuit is whether or not deliberately linking defamatory or libelous content (i.e you know what the linked content it) is the same as spreading defamatory or libelous statements.
The lawsuit is not about links for which you are not aware of the semantic content (i.e. search results from Google).
For example, I find a web page that incorrectly paints you as a pedophile. I link to it, and other likewise defamatory content, spread my link to your associates. I have written no defamatory content myself, but ....
To help seperate the demafation issue from the linking issue, here is some relevant reading of a precedent about publishing quotations: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc61/2009scc61.html
My read of it: the court leaves the jury a lot of leeway to infer intent of a writer based on common sense ... so the ruling on this new case will probably focus on what new defences (misunderstanding, possible edits of the document linked to, etc) a jury can consider, rather than letting the linker off the hook completely.
The only questions are: will the supreme court be smart enough to see this (it could affect them too if they link to external websites...assuming that you can actually sue a court?) and, if they aren't, whether the government is smart enough to see the consequences and fix them immediately without waiting to get sued.
If it's bad enough, the justices will simply give a current stay on their response. And let the government change the law, if it's really bad. The government will file an appeal and then change the law so it's not so fucked up.
The current justices we have on the supreme court are good, they're smart, and they understand technology for the most part. I'm not really worried about this.
Om, nomnomnom...
Justice Charron gets it, as did the lower courts. I'm therefor expecting the said "epic failure" for Charon's claim.
In addition, this this is a tempset in a teapot. The article is based on the desire of the news organizations to have something cool to talk about, rather that the recorded behavior of the courts.
In actual practice, courts are disinclined to make sweeping change is how a law is to be interpreted, and instead deal with the problem of "bad cases produce bad law" by writing very narrow verdicts.
Canadian courts in particular, when faced with massive failure of the law to meet its purpose, tend to send the law in question back to the legislature to be rewritten. If the supreme court were going to do something radical like define publishing the location of a defamatory article as equivalent to publishing the defamation, they'd had already said so, and put the government on notice they need to fix the law.
Instead they put it in the queue of boring stuff to write up in the next six months.
IMHO, Charron's radical claim is toast.
--dave (a philosopher, not a lawyer) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net