8 ms·
> £70,000 in "damages" Damn, libel law is ridiculous.
by kasabali 11mo ago
> £70,000 in "damages"
Damn, libel law is ridiculous.
- ceejayoz 11mo agoUK libel law is very friendly to the plaintiff.
- KaiserPro 11mo agoIts not as clear cut as it appears. Its expensive and painful to bring and defend a libel claim.
- ceejayoz 11mo agoIn the US, the plaintiff must prove the statement was false. In the UK, the defendant must prove the statement was true. In practice, this makes the UK setup pretty nasty (long, expensive, high risk), even when it arrives at the correct result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd
- tptacek 11mo agoTake a few minutes to poke around TechRights Garrett pages. This easily would have cleared the per se threshold in the US, too, although the damages assessment would not have been as straightforward.
- ceejayoz 11mo agoI'm not second-guessing this particular case; today's the first I've heard of it. I'm just noting that the American concept of libel and the British concept of libel are wildly different in practice.
- tptacek 11mo agoExcept that the "Opinion" defense in this judgement is fussier than US law (in US law, opinion is flat-out protected, honest or otherwise, so long as it doesn't directly claim to be based on undisclosed false facts), this reads pretty similar to a US libel case. I get that the two countries have very different legal doctrines on defamation, but they don't seem to be on display here. Also: a US judge would have been a lot less nice to the defendants.
- benjojo12 11mo agoIs it though? If someone posts a huge amount of articles about how you are various non-good things, then a employer might do a simple Google of your name on and think "Oh, actually, I don't think I want to hire that guy" that's worth quite a lot of money if that's a job that you actually wanted to get (and that results in a loss of income/opportunities) Typically speaking, you should probably only be saying things on the internet or otherwise that you have serious evidence for. One, to avoid looking like a complete idiot in case you're wrong or in a more serious case to stop you from being sued for libel It blows my mind how various parts of the wider world are seemingly quite happy to ("joking" or not) call each other pedophiles or various other things in a age where things are aggressively indexed by search engines or (worse) LLMs
- pavel_lishin 11mo agoIt also matters - or at least, should - whether you're expressing your opinion ("this guy is a fucking asshole"), vs. a claim of fact ("that diver is a pedophile"). I would not particularly want to express myself in a world where calling someone an asshole has a non-trivial chance of costing me £70k plus court fees.
- nairboon 11mo agoWhat's the difference between your examples? Both sentences could be an opinion or a fact.
- pavel_lishin 11mo ago"This guys is an asshole" is pretty clearly a subjective opinion I hold about a person, one that others might disagree with. "That diver is a pedophile" is pretty clearly a factual statement, implying that the person abuses kids, or has been convicted of such. (I know that, uh, the original statement was basically just an insult, but: it does posit a fact.)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 11mo agoHard to tell if you are arguing whether 70k is ridiculously large or ridiculously small.
- theoldgreybeard 11mo ago700,000 would have been better.
- bigfatkitten 11mo agoHardly matters if the unsuccessful party has no way of paying.
- theoldgreybeard 11mo agoThen you garnish all of their income until they die.
- bawolff 11mo agoAfter reading the judgement, its honestly kind of low. They basically refused to submit any evidence at all in their defense, and then were racist to the opposing side's lawyer.