Tom started a discussion about online libel and a few others such as Gavin picked up on it and asked:
I think you can claim to be a ‘man of straw’ and inability to pay
Anyone care to give him the good and bad news?
Given the fact that a fairly well known blogger around these parts got a cease and desist letter followed by a summons to the High Court over postings on his blog, I think the emerging Irish bloggersphere needs to realise the rules of this new world we are playing in. We’re free to post what we want but people and companies are also free to sue us over it. Digital Rights Ireland has put together the Digital Rights Ireland Pamphlet on Libel which every blogger, webforum owner, webforum poster and website owner should read and print off and attach to the side of their monitor.
Now, none of us in the group as far as I know are graphic designers, so if a logo expert or graphic designer would like to take the text and tart it up into a cute and stylish pamphlet then come talk to the DRI group.
if the posts that tom is talking about are the ones i think they are (and the ones i think they are *are* gone from the relevent blog, but still visible in google cache) then i think it would actually be worth talking specifially about those posts, and not this liberal knee-jerk freedom of speech thing. there was a lot said in those posts that was totally unfair, and many of the comments that that blogger allowed to be published should have been deleted immediately. what’s most funny about this though is the crusading zeal with which everything on the issue was being said at the time, and yet faced with difficulty the blogger meakly caved in. this notion, as per tom’s reported im conversation, that he would have mentioned it if asked about it is a laughable defence for the manner in which the posts were removed. those posts *should* have been removed, but the blogger still clearly feels aggireved, and i doubt if he’s learned a lesson from this. if you *really* want bloggers to learn a lesson from this case, then the specifics of it are, clearly, important, and talking vaguely of freedom of speech is doing the issue a disservice.
Some people just can’t see the hammer until it hits them.