The states of New York and Illinois have passed laws giving residents the right to go to local courts to have foreign libel judgments declared unenforceable if issued by courts where free-speech standards are lower than in America.
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His career has spanned three decades, and his cases have ranged from libel in Westmoreland v.
Historically, only the commission of slander or libel have been legitimate reasons for any legal system restraining speech, but even then, it is restrained or punished in a civil way after the fact.
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All the usual rules about copyright and libel still exist online (indeed, I know two bloggers who have been sued for libel in the English courts although that was a rather vexatious case rather than they really had libelled someone) and yes, all the usual stuff about incitement to violence, racial insult and so on still applies.
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Strict British libel laws may have had something to do with it.
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Then again, this is not so much worse than the food libel laws we have in America which allow Big Agriculture to bring lawsuits against critics (the most famous probably being Oprah Winfrey).
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Many people who have consistently and publicly opposed Irving and his views - including Deborah Lipstadt, the American academic, who defeated him in a libel trial - have argued against the type of holocaust denial law used by Austria.
But for a century efforts to reform libel law thoroughly have foundered on a combination of lawyerly self-interest, bureaucratic timidity and a quiet belief among many lawmakers that the media is already too careless with other people's reputations (not least with politicians' good names).
One is reversing the burden of proof for corporate claimants: if they want to sue for libel, they would have to show that the published material actually damaged their business.
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Sinn Fein and two of its representatives have launched a legal bid to halt a libel action brought against them by a former director of Northern Ireland Water.
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The bad guys in this are first and foremost the libel laws in the UK which have long been notorious for clamping down on the freedom of the press in that country.
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Nonsense, says Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argues that because all of us have equal access to it, the Net relegates libel and slander suits to the slag heap of history.
V. are filled with the names of celebrities who have hired him to testify in copyright, contract and libel cases in the past three decades: Kelsey Grammer, Joan Rivers, Blake Edwards, the Beatles, Larry Flynt.
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Several American states have passed or are pondering laws protecting their citizens from English libel judgments.
Lord McAlpine's lawyers have already said he will sue Speaker's wife Sally Bercow for libel over a similar tweet.
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In July, a leading British book publisher warned of the 'chilling effect' the law would have on journalism, after a judge rejected its defence of qualified privilege in a libel action brought by a former police officer.
In recent years the British tabloids have gorged on his foibles: A public and messy divorce was followed by a colorful libel suit he filed against a former Italian manager (whom he had fired).
As for the cost of libel actions, which can be ruinous to all but the biggest defendants, the MPs have few specific ideas, though they appeal to lawyers' sense of responsibility.
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Then there's the Defamation Bill - where the Lords got their way on the "serious harm test" requiring that companies would have to prove substantial financial loss, or at least the likelihood of it, before they could sue for libel.
Internet service providers have long argued that, like telephone companies, they were "common carriers" who could not be subject to libel laws.
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