{"id":2632,"date":"2009-09-18T17:15:09","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T16:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=2632"},"modified":"2009-09-18T17:15:09","modified_gmt":"2009-09-18T16:15:09","slug":"uk-law-to-change-on-internet-in-a-small-but-beneficial-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2009\/09\/18\/uk-law-to-change-on-internet-in-a-small-but-beneficial-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"UK law to change on internet — in a small but beneficial direction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article in the Register<\/a> says:<\/p>\n

\n

Defamation law currently states that someone has the right to sue every time defamatory material is published. This means that publishers could be liable many times over for the online publication of an article if a court agrees that the mere delivery of a web page to a reader counts as publication.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It seems that the Ministry of Love –sorry, that should be the equally Orwellian-sounding “Ministry of Justice” — is consulting on a change, and about time too.<\/p>\n

In most countries, the law is different.\u00a0 You publish something online, and that’s it.\u00a0 But in the UK “publication” online is when someone accesses it.\u00a0 This is very bad news, when the laws on what is allowed to be said keep changing.\u00a0 In the last five years the UK government has used the excuse of “hate speech” to criminalise people expressing disapproval of various favoured groups and policies.\u00a0 So expressing a perfectly legal distaste for some evil or other in 2000 — and I probably did — means that I can be prosecuted now for publishing “hate speech” today.<\/p>\n

Obviously the UK shouldn’t be criminalising free speech, however deserving the perverts that it wants to privilege.\u00a0 But still more, it shouldn’t be doing so retrospectively, which is the current situation.<\/p>\n

So … a little step towards ironing out a silly legal situation, and bringing UK law into line with the US.\u00a0 Now if only they would see sense on copyright and introduce a horizon of 1923 for copyright too…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article in the Register says: Defamation law currently states that someone has the right to sue every time defamatory material is published. This means that publishers could be liable many times over for the online publication of an article if a court agrees that the mere delivery of a web page to a reader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[60],"tags":[724],"class_list":["post-2632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freespeechonline","tag-freedom-of-speech-online"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}