August 26, 2007
Plaintiff Wins YouTube Defamation Action
A Finnish teacher has won a defamation action against his 15-year-old student, who posted an injurious video on YouTube.
The video was filmed at a school party and depicted the teacher singing (poorly, one presumes). On YouTube, the video description read ‘Karaoke of the mental hospital’. Whether this in itself would be defamatory in a common law jurisdiction is an open question, as the caption seems to refer to the school setting, rather than the performer.
Interestingly, the teacher chose not to proceed against YouTube itself, claiming only €2 000 in damages. However, the Court exercised its discretion to reduce damages to €800 in view of the defendant’s age and the swiftness with which the video was taken down.
Posted by Jaani at 9:49 PM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2006
Beattie Injunction
The Australian Labor Party last night won an injunction in the Supreme Court of Queensland in Brisbane to shut down a defamatory website that makes claims about Premier Peter Beattie.Posted by Jaani at 9:14 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2006
Internet Censorship in Vietnam
China isn't the only Asian nation quashing internet freedom, according to a new report. The Vietnamese government apparently also mimics the policies of its larger neighbor.Posted by Jaani at 9:14 PM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2006
Blocked Net
Advocates of a strong Net neutrality policy want a new law that would bar broadband Internet service providers from blocking or limiting users' access to content and services by favoring their affiliated businesses or charging content providers for better service. Advocates who frame this issue as one of discrimination would do better to describe it as a matter of monopoly, say commentators Alfred M. Mamlet and Daniel C.H. Mah.Posted by Jaani at 2:24 PM | Comments (0)
Self-Censoring 'Chinese Wikipedia' Launched
Billosaur writes "New Scientist is reporting that Baidu, China's largest search engine, is launching its own version of Wikipedia. The site, Baidupedia, differs from the more well-known Wikipedia in that it is self-censoring." From the article: "Unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to create and modify entries, Baidupedia is censored by the company to avoid offending the Chinese government. Entries to the encyclopaedia must first pass a filtering system before being added to the site. Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'."Posted by Jaani at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)
May 7, 2006
Apple Sics Lawyers on SomethingAwful
bheer writes "Apple has sent a threatening letter to SomethingAwful about a post in its forums that describes how to fix the overheating in some MacBook Pros by applying thermal paste properly, according to a post on Gizmodo. The post includes a brief excerpt from Apple's Service Source Manual which Apple wants removed. Gizmodo continues: 'the real problem [is] that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load.'"Posted by Jaani at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2006
ISP Not Liable for Defamatory Posting: United Kingdom Court
The United Kingdom High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division recently handed down its decision in Bunt v Tilley, holding that an internet service provider (‘ISP’) cannot be held liable purely by virtue of the fact that it plays host to defamatory content:
[36] In all the circumstances I am quite prepared to hold that there is no realistic prospect of the Claimant being able to establish that any of the corporate Defendants, in any meaningful sense, knowingly participated in the relevant publications. His own pleaded case is defective in this respect in any event. More generally, I am also prepared to hold as a matter of law that an ISP which performs no more than a passive role in facilitating postings on the internet cannot be deemed to be a publisher at common law. I would not accept the Claimant’s proposition that this issue “can only be settled by a trial”, since it is a question of law which can be determined without resolving contested issues of fact.
[37] I would not, in the absence of any binding authority, attribute liability at common law to a telephone company or other passive medium of communication, such as an ISP. It is not analogous to someone in the position of a distributor, who might at common law need to prove the absence of negligence: see Gatley on Libel and Slander (10th edn) at para 6-18. There a defence is needed because the person is regarded as having ‘published’. By contrast, persons who truly fulfil no more than the role of a passive medium for communication cannot be characterised as publishers: thus they do not need a defence.
In essence, the Court draws a distinction between people who knowingly permit the publication of defamatory content, and people who who have no reasonable opportunity to prevent such publication. This seems like a sound distinction — especially in an electronic realm. If a person knowingly permits a defamatory communication, but was in a position to prevent it, they should clearly be liable; however, liability should not attach to a web host or ISP who unwittingly carries such communications to their recipients, since they are not in such a position.
Posted by Jaani at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2006
Canada, Australia Get Tough on Hate Websites
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has issued a noteworthy Internet hate decision that focuses on the applicability of the Human Rights Act to Internet hate materials. The Tribunal ordered fines against several individuals for their role in maintaining several hate websites and newsletters.
Meanwhile, Australian authorities have acted against a white supremacist group conducting its activities in Adelaide, Australia. The US-based organisation has set up a local Web site, which lists a contact address as a suburban Adelaide post office box and an Australian business number. South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has referred it to local police in a bid to have it shut down.
Posted by Jaani at 5:22 PM | Comments (0)
March 11, 2006
Mohammed Caricature Leads to Internet Site Shutdown
The ‘Prophet Mohammed’ caricature saga has reached a new level of ridiculousness, with a Russian government agency announcing plans to shut down Bankfax, a popular online news website. The announcement comes after an anonymous reader posted the now-famous caricature on the Bankfax forum and ‘called for the destruction of Islam’.
The agency responsible for the decision is the Siberian branch of the Federal Service for Media Law Compliance and Cultural Heritage. It said that Bankfax ‘must be held responsible for the information it disseminates’ — a strange proposition indeed given the inherently intractable uncontrollable nature of public fora, and the fact that the caricature was in any event hardly illegal or defamatory.
The irony of all this ideological self-consciousness is that the cartoons, however offensive, are now more widely available than ever.
Posted by Jaani at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 6, 2006
China Defends Internet Policy; Australia Has Some Defending to Do
From Mercury News:
‘China’s premier Tuesday offered a defense of his nation’s Internet censorship and exhorted private companies to “exercise more self-discipline” if they want to operate in the huge market here. Premier Wen Jiabao, meeting the press in a once-a-year news conference, said sites available to China’s 111 million Internet users “should be able to convey the right message and information.”’
Evidently several of said users were unable to exercise quite enough discipline, with three Chinese websites just last week launching a phishing attack against Australian users. The websites attempted to trick clients of the National Australia Bank (‘NAB’) to divulge internet banking access details. Fortunately, NAB’s security response team was able to shut down the sites before any damage could be done.
It also seems increasingly difficult for Chinese internet users to ‘convey the right message and information’, with a so-called ‘cyber-dissident’ sentenced to ten years in a Chinese jail for publishing a controversial essay on the internet. Ren Zhiyuan, from the Shandong province, was sentenced by the Jining City Intermediate Court for ‘subverting state sovereignty’.
With stories of phishing and cyber-dissidance, it’s little wonder this site is blocked in China.
Update: But that’s not all. It looks as if Australia has some defending of its own to do. It seems that the Prime Minister’s office has ordered the shutdown of an Australian website featuring a political satire of John Howard:
A spoof John Howard website that featured a soul searching “apology” speech for the Iraq war has been shut down under orders from the Australian Government. Richard Neville, an Australian futurist and social commentator was mystified to discover his satirical website johnhowardpm.org had been blocked on Tuesday with no explanation from either his web hosting company, Yahoo or the domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. He said that after two days of silence, a customer service representative from Melbourne IT today informed him by telephone that the site had ‘been closed on the advice from the Australian Government’.
From what I can gather, the website was pulled (at least ostensibly) on the basis that it infringed copyright in the Prime Minister’s actual website — whose visual appearance the satire website replicated. Nonetheless, this raises a few thorny constitutional law issues (most obviously the implied freedom of political communication). Also troubling is Melbourne IT’s apparent capitulation to the government’s request that the site be taken down.
With all due credit to Melbourne IT, they probably would not have maintained the protection of ISP safe harbour provisions had they left the website online. However, when unqualified private entities are forced to become independent, ex parte and pre-emptive arbiters of copyright infringement, this raises serious questions about the rights of their customers — and, in this context at least, conflict with the paramount interest in political free speech created by Australia’s already limited constitutional protections.
Posted by Jaani at 8:19 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Tasmania to Censor Public Library Internet Access
'Tasmania will be the first state to censor Internet access on public library computers.'
Posted by Jaani at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2005
Media Bias and Macs
PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak wrote an opinion piece claiming that the technology writers at major news outlets -- namely The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Fortune and Forbes -- are strongly biased to covering Apple news, and notably more so than they write about Apple competitors, even Microsoft. The reason, Dvorak espouses, is that the tech writers at those publications all use the Mac. Thus, their familiarity with Apple and, in some cases, favoritism of the platform tends to cloud their objectivity.
Posted by Jaani at 9:57 PM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2005
Bloggers Not Eligible for Shield Law?
Drew writes "Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind), a co-sponsor to the Free Flow of Information Act 2005, has said that he does not expect bloggers to receive the protections proposed by the shield law under consideration. From the article: 'Are bloggers journalists or some of the commercial businesses that you here would probably not consider real journalists? Probably not, but how do you determine who will be included in this bill?' The bill is supposed to restore the Free Press in the US, Lugar said. But how can that be when there's no definition of 'journalist'?"Posted by Jaani at 6:39 PM | Comments (0)
October 7, 2005
Opening Arguments, Endlessly
Several influential blogs seem to be run by lawyers, who constitute considerably less than 1 percent of the population.Posted by Jaani at 7:01 PM | Comments (0)
October 6, 2005
Patent Ruling Threatens Free Speech
San Francisco - On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the United States Supreme Court, asking the Court to review an important patent case that has broad implications for free speech and consumers' rights.
The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled earlier this year that eBay violated MercExchange's online auction patents and that eBay could be permanently enjoined, or prohibited, from using the patented technology. Then the Court went a dangerous step further. It held that patentees who prove their case have a right to permanent injunctions unless the injunction poses a risk to public health. This "automatic injunction" rule deprives judges of their traditional discretion to consider how an injunction might affect other public interests -- including free speech online.
If this rule is allowed to stand, free expression could suffer.
"We're not saying injunctive relief is never a good idea," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "But courts must have the ability to look at how an injunction will affect a variety of public interests. That's especially true now, when so many companies are claiming patents on basic technologies that citizens use to communicate online."
In its brief, EFF argues that this ruling threatens free speech because patent owners who claim control over Internet publishing mechanisms are in a position to threaten anyone who uses them to broadcast their ideas, even for noncommercial purposes.
Added McSherry, "Given the explosion of new communications technologies such as blogs, instant messaging, and wikis, this is hardly the time to limit courts' ability to consider the benefits that a given technology brings to freedom of expression, or evaluate the chilling effects of forbidding the use of that technology."
You can read the full brief at:
www.eff.org/legal/cases/ebay_v_mercexchange/EFF_brief.pdf.
Posted by Jaani at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)
BT calls for closure of BTIrelandsucks.com
'Bog off' says site owner
Lawyers representing BT Ireland have called on the owner of BTIrelandsucks.com to pull the plug on the site claiming it has been registered in "bad faith".…
Posted by Jaani at 9:52 PM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2005
New Defamation Laws Seek Coherent National Approach
'The introduction of model defamation laws in NSW, Victoria, SA and WA meant there was a realistic prospect of a national defamation scheme, according to NSW Attorney General Bob Debus.'
Posted by Jaani at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
Lex Contrariwise? Doctors Sue Patients
In marked contrast to my previous post, several United States medical practitioners have pursued defamation claims against former patients, who had criticised their doctors’ lack of skill and proficiency on public websites:
Dr Boothe, who practices in the Dallas area, filed lawsuits in a state court in Collin County, Texas, in January against the disgruntled former patient, Dan Morikawa, and another man, Brent Hanson, who runs a Web site called LasikFraud.com.
Dr Boothe performed Lasik surgery, a form of laser-assisted vision correction, on Mr Morikawa in September 2004, according to court papers. But Mr Morikawa was unhappy with the results, and demanded his money back, citing a guarantee in one of Dr Boothe’s advertisements. Soon thereafter, Mr Morikawa created various Web sites in which he criticized Dr Boothe. One Web page said, “All these lives ruined by Dr William Boothe, his magic laser machine, and wild irresponsible advertising claims.”
According to Dr Boothe’s suits, Mr. Hanson republished allegations by Mr Morikawa on LasikFraud.com. Mr Hanson, a 41-year-old software developer, says he was a victim of bad eye surgery by another doctor in the 1990s and uses LasikFraud.com to warn others about potential problems with the procedure.
It is, unfortunately, one of the axioms of cyberspace that even mildly disgruntled customers can voice their discontent, and that owing to the ease with which such complaints can me made, will almost inevitably do so. For practitioners the subject of criticism, it can be a frustrating and demeaning experience: a few loud critics can easily dismantle someone’s reputation, especially where critics speak anonymously and defenders are few and far between. Anger is a much better motivator than satisfaction, after all.
However, it is also true that one of the great virtues of the internet, and of websites such as ePinions.com and now the National Doctor Database, is the honest, independent appraisals that prospective customers can access. Perhaps a website like LasikFraud goes somewhat beyond an honest, independent appraisal (though this is unclear from the facts). However courts ought to bear in mind the importance of these avenues of public criticism — to the same extent as they would when dealing with a printed publication — when determining these defamation claims.
Posted by Jaani at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2005
Canadian Court Reverses Net Publication Ruling
'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.'
Posted by Jaani at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
Apple Fails on Due Diligence, Subpoeanas
Ars Technica reports on the finding of a Californian court that Apple failed to conduct due diligence when issuing subpoeanas to the operators of rumour websites earlier this year. In failing to conduct an in-house check for the cause of the document leak, attempting to compel disclosure from journalists was unjustified, the Court said:
Documents (PDF) unsealed in Californian state court shows that Apple failed to comply with the state laws when they legally pressed AppleInsider and PowerPage to reveal their sources. In March of this year a judge ruled that the websites will have to cough up the names of their confidential sources in response to lawsuits filed by Apple over product leaks. The sites had reported insider information in December 2004 on a supposedly upcoming product from Apple called "Asteroid," which some people believe is a FireWire audio interface for GarageBand.Apple’s lawyers immediately went after the sites, subpoenaing them to reveal their sources. The defendants responded that they were journalists, and were protected by California’s shield law. …
It appears that Apple has adopted a shoot-first, ask questions later approach to dealing with rumors sites. The company took no depositions, required no oaths from its employees, and failed to subpoena anyone related to the company or the development of the device in question.
Posted by Jaani at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye
The online response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrates the power of a fast and flexible web. So why are judges and lawmakers strangling the internet in red tape? Commentary by Jennifer Granick.Posted by Jaani at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2005
China bans Skype
China continues to make waves as a burgeoning technology and industrial giant, this time apparently banning VoIP provider Skype. A local arm of China Telecom, the country's biggest fixed-line telecommunications operator, has moved to block access to the Skype service, according to the Financial Times. The move, by Shenzhen Telecom, highlights the concerns of Chinese operators about the impact of VoIP on their businesses, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said. "An employee at a Shenzhen Telecom service centre said staff had been instructed to tell customers who complained about being unable to access SkypeOut that such internet telephone services were illegal...Posted by Jaani at 8:47 PM | Comments (0)
ASIO thumbs-down will affect US activist's travel: lawyer
Lawyers for an American peace activist facing deportation from Australia say he may never be able to travel overseas again.Posted by Jaani at 8:44 PM | Comments (0)
September 2, 2005
Weblog Sued in Defamation for Reader Comments
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes 'In a legal case being watched closely by bloggers, an Internet company has sued the owner of a blog for comments posted to his site by readers, the Wall Street Journal Online reports. Traffic-Power.com, which sells tools for boosting Web traffic, sued Aaron Wall, age 25, over statements posted in the comments section of Wall's search-engine-optimization blog, SEOBook.com:
Please don't make any defamatory comments here, okay?'Legal analysts said the case falls into somewhat murky legal territory, but that Mr. Wall may have some protection from liability under federal law,' WSJ.com says. 'Courts generally have held that the operators of computer message boards and mailing lists cannot be held liable for statements posted by other people. Blogs might be viewed in a similar light, they said.'
However, Daniel Perry, a lawyer who has followed the case, says that Wall's case is complicated by his own negative comments about Traffic-Power, which could be seen as a competitor to his site. 'To be candid, he sort of moved into this moving propeller,' Perry said. 'The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people.'"
Posted by Jaani at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2005
Free Speech Prevails: Anonymous Critics' Identities Protected
'Utah - Private information about anonymous online critics was protected this week when a Utah man dropped his lawsuit against people who had allegedly made critical comments about him on message boards and blogs, including the Yahoo! SCOX board. The plaintiff in the case had asked the court to let him use the subpoena process to unmask his anonymous "John Doe" critics.
Posted by Jaani at 8:58 PM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2005
Chinese Government Censors Weblog Star
‘Reuters reports on China’s efforts to censor its latest Internet-born star, a young woman known as Furong Jiejie (‘Sister Furong’). She is seen as a pioneer pushing the boundaries of traditional media controls, but in the process has become a target of government censors. In late July, authorities told the country’s top weblog host to move Furong-related content to low-profile parts of the site. Her pictures can still be found online, but links to them and chatrooms about her have disappeared from the front pages of major Web portals.’
The [Chinese] government has created a special Internet police force believed responsible for shutting down domestic sites posting politically unacceptable content, blocking some foreign news sites and jailing several people for their online postings.
Bulletin boards operated by some of China’s most prestigious universities have been barred to outside users, while a number of Internet cafes and online game companies have been shut for allowing users to access pornographic, violent or otherwise off-limits content.
So far as I can tell, this website is still censored in China.
Posted by Jaani at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2005
EFF: Anonymous Online Critics Should Not Be Silenced
'A case brought in a US district court by a Utah man threatens to undermine the First Amendment right to speak anonymously on issues of public concern. In Merkey v Yahoo SCOX et al, the plaintiff requested an expedited process for serving subpoenas that would unmask anonymous "John Doe" critics who participated in a discussion of another court case, in which Utah-based technology company Santa Cruz Operation ('SCO') is suing IBM.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation ('EFF'), along with the American Civil Liberties Union ('ACLU') of Utah, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, arguing that a court must review the merits of a litigant's claims before legal process can expose the true names of online Does.
The case arose out of several anonymous postings that appeared in a Yahoo group, as well as the weblogs Groklaw and IP-Wars.net.
Posted by Jaani at 9:36 PM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2005
Best-Selling Authors to Auction Right to Name Characters
'Next month, Stephen King, Amy Tan and other best-selling writers will auction on eBay the right to name characters in their new novels. The profits will go to the First Amendment Project, whose lawyers have repeatedly gone to court to protect the free speech rights of activists, writers and artists. One such case, over whether a high school student's angry poetry constituted a "criminal threat," recently went before the California Supreme Court.'
Posted by Jaani at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2005
There's a Difference between 'Sex Discrimination' and 'Sexual Discrimination'?
A recent case highlights the difference between 'sex discrimination' and 'sexual discrimination'. While it is illegal to favour one sex over another, taking advantage of an employee's sexuality is not illegal of itself, writes IR law specialist and CCH columnist Joe Catanzariti, partner, Clayton Utz.Posted by Jaani at 5:26 PM | Comments (0)
Google Gets Googled: Googleopoly?
Google's decision to shut out CNET for one year for googling CEO Eric Schmidt has some questioning the maturity of the burgeoning search giant. CNET reporter Elinor Mills, in a strong news piece examining how personal information can be obtained using Google, turned the technology on Schmidt and cited some public information on him, such as his salary, his hobbies and his hometown. But Google, usually a media darling, threw a fit, announcing that a blackball will last until August 2006.
Posted by Jaani at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2003
The Doublespeak of Slave Morality
Oh dear: Political Correctness alert! The Los Angeles County Council has, according to Canutseon, requested the removal of several potentially offensive technological terms. Among them are the adjectives 'master'/'slave' (used in conjunction), to signal the mode of accessing an IDE device affixed to a computer. If this is true, it is indeed a feat of mind-boggling ignominiousness, and highlights the inability of the Californian government to address more pressing matters.
This is reminiscent of some of the more extreme aspersions of the late 80s, when radical feminism was at its height. Finding a discriminatory cultural narrative in a term which denotes the command response priorities of internal electronic devices is a twisted deconstruction of grand proportions - one that is far more telling than the terms themselves.
Perhaps more worrying is this call by the Chicago Centre of Gender Studies to abolish the 'arbitrary' separation of public toilets into male and female segments, which it claims discriminates against trans-gendered persons. No doubt unisex toilets would generate just as many complaints (though perhaps of a slightly different nature).
At any rate, they seem to be forgetting other racially contingent terms, none of which seem to raise any eyebrows. After all, how else could one describe male or female audio leads? "The one with the pointy bits and the one with the receptacles?" (arguably more offensive). I've yet to meet someone - male, female, or otherwise - who fails to see the analogy.
What seems to be forgotten in all this is that the formation of a great deal of seemingly politically incorrect terminology is purely pragmatic, and has no political subtext. In this way, many computer terms are simply a result of continual abbreviation and optimisation. Depoliticising these commands would almost invariably make them longer, placing an onerous burden upon computer users to type ever-increasing wads of text - all to placate a bunch of oversensitive, overblown egos.
For example, one would hardly propose altering the Unix manual command from "man" to "person." Equally ridiculous it would be to claim that the term "daemon" (a memory resident system process) perpetuates the hegemony of Judeo-Christian norms. Perhaps sillier still, "rich text files" could be more transparently denoted as "exploitive capitalist texts."
But why stop there! The popular C programming language function, abort(), must now be called choice()! The command line keyword "kill" should be (more affectionately) termed "euthanise." Internet Explorer's "history" feature must renounce its implicit patriarchal values and be replaced by "herstory." Blacklists? Exclusion lists! Floppy drive? Tensile challenged. Where does the madness end? (Post more examples in the comments section.)
My analysis? This attempt to subvert such accepted, relatively neutral, and foundational words as master and slave is the result of its initiator's own slave consciousness. Bounded by guilt and perceiving themselves as indebtted to others, the Politically Correct individual seeks, above all else, validation and acceptance. To this end, he (notice your reaction) adopts language guaranteed not to be offensive to anyone (well, except those of us who dislike overt gypping). The individual restricted by norms of political correctness is, ironically, submissive to them - a linguistic slave. Such persons need, basically, to overcome their own, limited conception of themselves and others. Doubleplusgood.
Posted by Jaani at 1:19 AM | Comments (2)
October 29, 2003
Packer: 'Power-Crazed Greedy Man'?
Australia's man of largest financial quantum, Kerry Packer, yesterday lost a defamation case against rival media group John Fairfax Pty Ltd. Packer claimed that a satirical caption appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald on 16 December, 1999 construed him as 'a power-crazed greedy man.' Unsurprisingly, Fairfax-owned newspaper The Age was quick to carry the story.
The alleged defamatory material was the following caption, which appeared alongside a photo of Mr Packer: '"I'll have every bit of New Year's Eve, all of the new millennium, anything that moves. And I'll have you, too" - Dr Kerry Packer.'
He used examples of celebrity spoof shows such as Fast Forward and CNNNN which sent up powerful and influential people all the time.
"There can be no doubt that ordinary reasonable readers understood this as a joke," Mr Blackburn said.
The jury inclined seemed to agree, deciding that the article should be construed in the comical tone in which the newspaper made the statement. In what must be a relief for Fairfax, the Court awarded costs against Mr Packer (and his postnomial toting brethen).
Posted by Jaani at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
October 1, 2003
State Censorship and Cyber Autonomy
A recent report published by Privacy International suggests that internet censorship is at an all time high. In addition to extensive regulation by non-democratic states, the study points to the heightened sensitivity of many Western governments in response to a perceived terrorist threat. However, it is noted that an active censorship poses an even greater threat to activists and persons relying on the internet as a source of independent information:
This last comment is particularly incisive in relation to the present situation in the United States. The Patriot Act grants additional investigative powers to law-enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel, many provisions of which relate to the active monitoring of telecommunications (including e-mail). Interestingly, the article notes that much of the technology used to censor the internet (and other high-tech forms of communication) is provided by the West.
Did you know this site is blocked in China? I'm not quite sure what I might have written here to attract the information of the censors, but sure enough I have a threat rating of 2/5, based on the proportion of provinces in which the site is inaccessible. Perhaps I linked to a site on the same IP address as something questionable, or they found my blather unforgivably liberal.
Censorship has always been a sensitive issue, but it is essentially just another incarnation of the classic paradox of modern liberalism - tension between individual autonomy and government regulation. Ultimately, censorship exists in reaction to a perceived need to protect individual freedoms, but problematic in relation to what constitutes 'threat'. Authorities need to recognise that it is largely impossible to regulate the flow of information in a global society; even if a reasonable justification for the restriction of access to certain information could be made, it would not be practically feasible to implement.
Many governments are using terrorism to justify increased surveillance activities (such as censorship), but this comes at the cost of civil liberties. As the article notes, what this justification ignores is that intelligence is supposed to protect liberty, not be used to justify its curtailment. Increasingly, though, this is what is happening; frighteningly often, governments will refer to technology (of all things) as though its very existence is a threat to civil liberty.
As encryption technologies continue to develop, governments will face increasing hurdles in attempting to monitor and censor information. This is a Good ThingTM, as present governments almost invariably seem to incorrectly determine 'threat' to individual autonomy, and impose additional restrictions upon liberty in the name of maintaining it. If quantum cryptography ever becomes widely available, a substantial reconceptualisation of censorship would need to occur. Effectively, governments would not be able to monitor information-flow at all, which is probably why (if the technology is ever developed) it will either be highly regulated or quietly tucked away.
Recent trends in the development of private communication mediums are definitely a sign of things to come, but until an unbreakable method of data security is employed, civil liberty remains a concern online.
Posted by Jaani at 2:04 AM | Comments (0)
September 6, 2003
Ban 'Offensive and Menacing Behaviour', Alston Argues
Australia's most vociferious luddite has proposed to ban the use of the internet for offensive and menacing behaviour, with offenders to face up to two-years in prison, according to a press release issued by the Department of Communications, yesterday.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet content hosts will be exempted from the new offence where they do not have knowledge of the content of the material that they transmit or host.
The minister's press release seems (like so many others) to rely for its justification of the censorship law on everybody's preferred scapegoat of the modern era: child pornography. It has been used as a justification for all kinds of curtailments of civil liberties, from freedom of speech to privacy rights. When will authorities learn that it is impossible to effectively restrict content from being uploaded onto a website? Convictions are more likely to be made by (lawfully) pursuing those individuals who access the material.
Microsoft has established a dedicated Linux research facility from which to monitor the progress of the biggest threat to its share of the server OS market. Evidently 5 years of brushing aside its furry-fethered bretheren as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" (source) has made them overly complacent in dealing with competitors whom they can't buy out.
Directions Magazine has published an interesting article about the progress of local area network bandwidth over the past two decades. LAN speed appears to increase by an order of magnitude every 5 years or so, and looks set to shortly outpace the speed of client storage devices. The day my network card can receive files quicker than my hard drive can store them will be a happy one indeed.
Finally, AMD has updated their Duron/Morgan line of budget-oriented CPUs, with new models ranging from 1.4Ghz to 1.8Ghz. This reviewer manages to overclock their processor to 2.3Ghz with stock cooling, suggesting that AMD has a fair bit of headroom in their production process. However, yields for their flagship Athlon64 line remain dismally low, with sources suggesting that the company may have considerable difficulty meeting demand for shipments when the CPU is released come 23 September.
Posted by Jaani at 8:16 PM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2003
Internet Defamation Trial Date Set
In what promises to be a landmark case for internet publishers, Gutnick v Dow Jones will be heard in Melbourne on 3 October, 2003.
This case concerns the appeal of one Joe Gutnick, a miner who claims he was defamed by the Wall Street Journal, in which it was stated that he was accused of money laundering. This follows a controversial decision in December last year to allow the case to be heard in Australia - the country in which the plaintiff resides - rather than the United States - the country in which the publisher's web server is located - a move which has interesting repercussions for internet media groups.
The key issue was whether the case should proceed in terms of United States defamation law, or whether the Australian understanding of the tort should be applied. American precedent suggests the plaintiff should be denied recovery; however, this defence was rejected by the High Court of Australia last December:
What this means is that internet publishers may need to consider not just laws relating to defamation from their own jurisdiction, but potentially all jurisdictions. Though only Australia has precedent to support this, in the future other common law jurisdictions may follow suit and hold publishers accountable on their own terms for libellous material accessible in their jurisdiction.
The majority of the High Court downplayed this burden, noting that:
This may be the case in many circumstances, but - and with respect - it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Detailed court reports to follow.
Posted by Jaani at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
