UK Law: Webmasters and Bloggers

A former Tory local council candidate has failed in his libel action against Google over comments posted about him on a blog.

Payam Tamiz started legal proceedings against Google after allegedly defamatory comments were written about him on the London Muslim section of Blogger.com.

Google argued that it had no control over any of the content and had no way of knowing whether the comments posted were true or not.

In a written judgement handed down at the high court on Friday, Mr Justice Eady said Google should not be regarded as a publisher under the established principles of the common law.

Eady said that even if Google was regarded as the publisher of the offending words, it would be exempted from liability in accordance with regulation 19 of the European Union's electronic commerce directive 2002.

Last week the High Court convicted two newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Sun, of contempt of court for the publication on their websites of a photograph of a man toting a gun during the ongoing criminal trial of that man. They are now likely to face large fines.

It was the first such case of contempt relating to an online publication. By way of background, Alex Bailin QC has posted an excellent comment piece on the Inforrm blog. I have also already discussed the judgment, and the ominous warning by the court that instant news requires instant and effective protection for the integrity of a criminal trial.

My post generated comments from concerned bloggers and tweeters asking what this meant for contempt and online publishing going forward. This is a hard question to answer as it mostly depends on which cases the Attorney General chooses to prosecute. But, although the following is not legal advice, reviewing the case-law on contempt provides some indication of may be to come, and common-sense ways in which publishers, including tweeters and bloggers, can avoid being prosecuted.

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The Daily Mail does not have to identify the people behind two anonymously posted comments on its website because to do so would breach their rights to privacy, the High Court has said.

Jane Clift was the subject of a news story about being put on a council list of potentially violent people. She demanded information from the Daily Mail that would help her to identify two commenters so that she could sue them for defamation.

But Mrs Justice Sharp said that the posters' rights to privacy were more important than the woman's right to take legal action about comments that were little more than pub talk. She said that Clift's case was not strong enough to merit the identification, and that she should not have taken the comments as seriously as she did.

Mrs Justice Sharp said in her ruling.

It was fanciful to suggest that a sensible and reasonable reader would understand those comments as being anything more than 'pub talk'.

The postings were of two lines and were effectively posted anonymously by members of the public who did not report to have knowledge of the matters they concerned. It is important to put the postings into context as to their meaning and what they were commenting on.

The potential disclosure of information to [Clift] engaged the users' rights to respect for their private and family lives under the European Convention on Human Rights.

It was disproportionate to grant the application.

A company is responsible for making available internet-hosted material in the country where its host server is based, not in the country where the material is read or used, the High Court has said.

The Court ruled that the law should be applied to material hosted on the internet in the same way that it applies to satellite television, meaning that the jurisdiction covering infringing material is that of the country from where the material was broadcast.

The Scottish and English football leagues and Football Dataco claimed that Sportradar of Switzerland and its German subsidiary infringed their copyrights and database rights when it published live football data on the internet for use by betting companies.

Sportradar said that the English courts did not have jurisdiction to hear a case based on the database rights question because it had not made available any content in the UK.

The Court agreed, saying that the making available takes place where the server is, even if the use of material takes place somewhere else.

The judgment, a preliminary ruling in a case which will continue to a full trial, clarifies the liabilities of online publishers and restricts those liabilities in some key respects the country from which they publish.

Bloggers might be able to escape court reporting restrictions because they have not been informed of the restrictions. An ongoing case about a boy said to have fathered a child at 12 years of age has highlighted the issue.

Reporting on that case has been restricted but foreign news outlets have carried stories about it, with versions of those stories appearing on websites accessible from the UK.

Some bloggers have picked up the stories and may be within their rights to publish while national newspapers cannot. The court order imposing the reporting restrictions says that it only applies to people who know about the restriction.

There is no central database of reporting restrictions, so while newspapers are informed of restrictions, bloggers generally are not, opening a legal loophole for their possible publishing of restricted information.

The order does, in principle, apply to 'bloggers' because it applies to all persons who know that the order has been made, said James McBurney of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM. Bloggers, along with any other person or corporation are therefore prohibited from publishing any of the restricted material, but only if they know that it is in place to start with, which is where the difficulty arises: how are they supposed to know about it?

McBurney said that publishers and bloggers should take down material from a case once they find out that it is the subject of a reporting restriction.