Facebook in the libel and privacy net

Here’s one you might have missed while the Mosley case was going through.

A man has won damages of £22,000 and costs for a false entry in Fasebook. He won both libel and privacy damages, as did his company.
I can’t emphasise enough, the Internet is as much a publishing media as paper. Libel and privacy extends to the Internet just as to paper.

That might rub against the grain of the Internet’s founders and of the creative commons advocates.
But it is the law, like it or lump it.

iPodders versus Brussels

The war over copyright continues to rage on, well past its 300th birthday.

The latest battle in the fight between openness and protection is prompted by the European Union. It is proposing to bring the protection of recordings “into line with” that of literary works. It wants member states to give 95 years to recordings, now only 50 years.

Literary works are 70 years from the death of the author. The first copyright act, in 1709, gave the copyholder just 14 years. Since then the length of copyright has been the cause of own warfare between owners and users.

On the other side of the battle against the EU is a battalion of heavy European academics. They have gone public today with a letter to The Times. They are very unhappy about two things:
They were not consulted; and
The move will alienate a younger generation that fails to see a principled basis to the extension.

So it’s the iPoders versus Brussels. In the spirit of the famous “Up Yours Delors” campaign of The Sun I have a proposal.

At a set time everybody goes outside, takes out their iPod, mobile phone etc and waves it in the direction of Brussels chanting “Bugger off Barroso”.

Lawyers clean up in McCann cases

Only the libel lawyers have got any cheer out of the continuing tragedy of the McCann case.
They have been able to pick up £550,000 in damages for Robert Murat from 12 UK newspapers. And their fees. This follows a similar payout by Express Newspapers to the McCann parents for allegations that they were involved in their daughter’s disappearance.
There was a feeding frenzy in Fleet Street over the McCann case. The fierce competition between papers led reporters and editors to go well over the top.
Editors seemed to think that just because the McCanns and Murat were in Portugal they were free to speculate. They seemed to have forgotten that both Murat and the McCanns had reputations in the UK.
The feeding frenzy led them to think that acting as a herd they would be invulnerable. Now they realise they are not.
Unfortunately this incident will lead to more caution of the wrong type in the news room. Publishers may well instruct editors that caution is the watchword. The role of the press as investigators is likely to be further eroded.
The public is not best served by cautious papers which foolishly forgot their libel law.
Sue, Rabbit and Run are the winners again.
I hope they have taken the offending articles out of their online services or the libel lawyers will be after them for seconds. But to do so is an attempt to rewrite history, as if to say we never printed that story. But they did, and now they are paying.

Stony-faced Eady presides over Mosley case

One sentence leapt out of the coverage today of the Max Mosley privacy action against the News of the World. “Mr Justice Eady sat stony-faced as he heard that the woman was known for arranging bondage sessions involving a man dressed in a judge’s gown and several girls,” wrote Dominic Kennedy in The Times.

To see what a stony-faced Mr J Eady looks like click here.

Mr J Eady presides over defamation and privacy cases in the High Court. He has taken a leading role in extending the law of privacy. He has taken the Act’s eight article “Everyone has the right for respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence” and applied it with vigour.


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Before the Mosley case Mr J Eady’s most extensive development of privacy was in McKennitt v Ash. In it he said a very high degree of misbehaviour would have to be demonstrated for a defendant in a privacy case to use a public interest defence. “The mere fact, that a celebrity falls short, from time to time, could not possible justify exposure.”

Will Mr J Eady consider Mosley’s behaviour as falling short? Or will he consider it part of normal behaviour, as the Mosley camp argues? The irony is if he considers it part of normal behaviour and is “broad minded” about it, then it does fall within privacy.

Just look at the photo of Mr J Eady again and place your bets.

There’s more to come because, as they say at the end of the reporting, “The case continues”.

Libel or price of Carter-Ruck a crime?

I had to dip into one of the bibles of libel, Carter-Ruck on Libel and Slander, today and got quite a shock. “Libel is a crime,” he writes.

It must be one of the shortest sentences in all of the 737 pages of his book. I knew libel as a civil action: and knew of the 1840s Criminal Libel Act. But “libel is a crime” really hit me.

Indeed it is a crime. The 1843 Act has not been appealed. Lord Scarman, who was known for his liberality, said a criminal libel is “a grave, not a trivial libel”.

And there follows in Carter-Ruck’s book a chapter on blasphemous, seditious or obscene libel.

Surely time for all of these to be off the statute book.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect is that I had to pay for this book twice. I left a copy on a plane. Second hand copies are currently knocking out at £237 for the fifth edition. That price is a crime.

Protect your IP and survive

Defending intellectual property (IP) is not given as much emphasis as using the IP of others or creating IP. It should have equal weight in the policies and practices of every journalist, editor and publisher.

We all know who defends IP: Walt Disney does and others don't mess with their content as a result. Publishers need to build a reputation as strong as Disney if they want to defend their property

There are six simple and quite inexpensive steps to take to defend IP in publishing.

First, develop a culture of defending IP within the company. Everybody has their role. Journalists looking at the competition's paper publications and Web sites play a key role. Every member of staff should be on the look out. Possible infringements should be flagged up right away.

Second, register the trade mark of the titles of magazines. It's quite cheap, only £200. And it can be done in a few months. The UK Government's Intellectual Property Office has some clear guidance on this.

Third, make clear the terms and conditions of use in paper publications and on Web sites. Write these in English, not the normal legalese which people cannot understand. Put them in the flannel panel of paper publications and in a small but visible slot on the home page. Say, clearly, what is in the public domain and what is not.

Fourth, keep an eye out for passing off. If you have established a presence in the market and others come to copy it, then you can act. VNU did over Computer Active and so did Red over Real.

Fifth, when you get the big interview, when you publish anything you think others will be particularly interested in, mark it clearly as your copyright. You don't have to under current copyright law, but it does give a clear warning to others that you consider it yours alone.

Finally, act to defend your IP. Send out clear and prompt emails and letters to anybody using you IP without permission. Send clear notices even to the small fry. If the individual user puts it in the public domain without your permission, you may get to the appoint where you cannot defend your property because it has been copied too much.

If you don't want to protect your IP, that's OK. Clearly mark material with the creative commons sign at whatever level you choose if you are happy that it is used by others.

In other words: Protect and survive.