Today's High Court ruling in the WSJ Online's libel case has, simply, huge implications for online publishing.
In short, it tears up the notion of general publication as being actionable. Now it seems the legal watermark is publication plus an audience deemed large enough to have any impact.
Surely this raises more questions than it answers. Who decides how many people have to read a piece to make it defensible? Does it matter what size the potential audience might be? How does anyone know that the five people who read the article weren't, say, clients of the plaintiff, and as such his professional reputation may have been fundamentally damaged more by that limited exposure than by a broader, less influential audience?
And also, if the ruling is dependent on technological criteria such as the number of page views of the story in question, how can anyone know that the five people who read the story didn't copy it and circulate it via email to a million others?
I, for example, only read the details of the court case in a forwarded email.
Here's how it was reported in The Guardian today:
Libel action lost because only five people read story
Thursday February 03 2005
The Guardian
A high court judge today overturned a libel ruling against a newspaper's online operations because technical investigations had shown that only five people in the UK had read the story in question.
The ruling in favour of the Wall Street Journal's American publisher, Dow Jones, has been hailed as a "major development in English law".
Dow Jones' successful appeal related to an original judgment in favour of Saudi businessman Yousef Jameel, who had sued for libel over a story on the Wall Street Journal Online website that falsely linked him to funding al-Qaida.
The high court today accepted Dow Jones' argument that the case was a waste of the court's time because it transpired that only five people had read the article. This is because, unlike printed newspapers, online newspapers can tell how many times any given story has been opened by a remote user.
The proceedings related to a story headlined "War on Terror. List of Early al Qaeda donors points to Saudi elite, charities", which included an interactive link to the so-called list of donors, which included Mr Jameel's name.
Lord Phillips said today there must be a substantial number of hits on a website to merit court action, otherwise proceedings amounted to an abuse of process.
Mr Jameel's lawyers said he began legal proceeding in the belief that the website had between 5,000-6,000 subscribers in the UK, according to Dow Jones' marketing information. It was not until later that it emerged that only five people had looked at the story.
The Wall Street Journal's lawyer, Mark Stephens, said the ruling has introduced a new substantiality test because it contrasted with a previous ruling in Australia that awarded damages against an online publication even though only nine people had read the article.
In short, it tears up the notion of general publication as being actionable. Now it seems the legal watermark is publication plus an audience deemed large enough to have any impact.
Surely this raises more questions than it answers. Who decides how many people have to read a piece to make it defensible? Does it matter what size the potential audience might be? How does anyone know that the five people who read the article weren't, say, clients of the plaintiff, and as such his professional reputation may have been fundamentally damaged more by that limited exposure than by a broader, less influential audience?
And also, if the ruling is dependent on technological criteria such as the number of page views of the story in question, how can anyone know that the five people who read the story didn't copy it and circulate it via email to a million others?
I, for example, only read the details of the court case in a forwarded email.
Here's how it was reported in The Guardian today:
Libel action lost because only five people read story
Thursday February 03 2005
The Guardian
A high court judge today overturned a libel ruling against a newspaper's online operations because technical investigations had shown that only five people in the UK had read the story in question.
The ruling in favour of the Wall Street Journal's American publisher, Dow Jones, has been hailed as a "major development in English law".
Dow Jones' successful appeal related to an original judgment in favour of Saudi businessman Yousef Jameel, who had sued for libel over a story on the Wall Street Journal Online website that falsely linked him to funding al-Qaida.
The high court today accepted Dow Jones' argument that the case was a waste of the court's time because it transpired that only five people had read the article. This is because, unlike printed newspapers, online newspapers can tell how many times any given story has been opened by a remote user.
The proceedings related to a story headlined "War on Terror. List of Early al Qaeda donors points to Saudi elite, charities", which included an interactive link to the so-called list of donors, which included Mr Jameel's name.
Lord Phillips said today there must be a substantial number of hits on a website to merit court action, otherwise proceedings amounted to an abuse of process.
Mr Jameel's lawyers said he began legal proceeding in the belief that the website had between 5,000-6,000 subscribers in the UK, according to Dow Jones' marketing information. It was not until later that it emerged that only five people had looked at the story.
The Wall Street Journal's lawyer, Mark Stephens, said the ruling has introduced a new substantiality test because it contrasted with a previous ruling in Australia that awarded damages against an online publication even though only nine people had read the article.
posted by Steve at 7:47 PM
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