Source: http://ocla.ca/our-work/reports/canadian-defamation-law-is-noncompliant-with-international-law/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 00:02:52+00:00

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SUMMARY: Defamation law in Canada is contrary to international law, in both design and practice. Under international law, the right to hold an opinion is absolute, and the right of freedom of expression can be restricted “for respect of the rights or reputations of others” solely using written laws that must conform to the “strict tests of necessity and proportionality”. With Canadian civil defamation law, the state has unfettered discretion from an unwritten common law that provides presumed falsity, presumed malice, unlimited presumed damages, and broad gag orders enforceable by jail, using a subjective judicial test for “defamation” without requiring any evidence of actual damage to reputation. Also, Canada’s practice of its defamation law materially aggravates the noncompliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (eleven impugned rules and practices are described). A final section broadly examines the underlying social and historic reasons for having developed an oppressive defamation law, followed by recommendations.
2. This article is divided in four parts. First, I prove that the Canadian common law of defamation is in violation of international law, and is therefore unconstitutional. Second, I show that the practice in the application of this defamation law aggravates the noncompliance. Third, I explore how and why this situation occurred, from a social and historic perspective. Finally, I make recommendations for a statute for civil defamation, which would be compliant with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
4. Therefore, in post-Charter Canada, when a defendant is sued for defamation: damages, falsity, and malice of defamation (intent) are presumed. The plaintiff need not prove actual damage to reputation, or the defendant’s intent to damage reputation, or that the words complained of are false.
A defamatory statement is one which has a tendency to injure the reputation of the person to whom it refers; which tends, that is to say, to lower him in the estimation of right‑thinking members of society generally and in particular to cause him to be regarded with feelings of hatred, contempt, ridicule, fear, dislike, or disesteem.
(d) punitive damage (based on evidence of egregious malice).
12. The complexity and subtleties of the common law of defamation are antithetical to Canada’s obligation to provide a defamation statute that is in conformity with the Covenant requirement of clarity, not to mention the “unfettered discretion” that is associated with unlimited presumed damages, presumed falsity, a subjective test for “defamation”, and broad gag orders enforceable by jail.
13. “Necessity”, here, means that it must be demonstrably necessary to apply the state-enforced penalty (published correction, apology, damages, costs, gag order, imprisonment) in order to achieve the goal of “respect of the … reputations of others”. The strict requirement of necessity is meaningless unless the state imposes an onus on the defamation plaintiff to establish both: evidence-based actual damage to reputation, and necessity of the nature and degree of the desired penalty.
14. “Proportionality”, here, means that the penalties cannot be in excess (in nature and degree) of what is needed to achieve reparation and prevention of any demonstrated actual damage to reputation; otherwise the principle is made meaningless by a subjective judicial determination of both “defamation” and “reputation”.
17. In contrast, in a defamation case there is no cap on the amount of awards for unproven damage to “reputation” at large, even when there is no evidence for actual damage to reputation. Following orders for large costs and damages, the court can then permanently and broadly gag the defendant, on the sufficient basis of inability to pay the costs and damages, and enforce the gag with imprisonment.
19. The Supreme Court has never revisited that dissenting opinion. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has insisted on turning logic on its head by implementing the Andrews cap in all cases involving physical or bodily injury (not admitting —unless proven at the time of the trial — that additional actual harm can result directly from the original said physical or bodily injury, such as medical depression and complex aggravating medical conditions), and by applying the Andrews cap to cases of wrongful criminal convictions (again, not admitting that prolonged imprisonment can cause severe medical conditions and general loss of health long after the trial for wrongful conviction has ended), while prescribing that general damages in defamation should have no cap, where damages are presumed, where the test for “defamation” is subjective, and where actual damage to “reputation” need not be established with evidence.
20. These features of the Canadian jurisprudence of damages make it clear that the Canadian common law of defamation is at least incompatible with, if not contrary to, the Covenant principles of necessity and proportionality. This is in stark contrast to Canada’s Covenant obligation to enact laws that implement necessity and proportionality in protecting freedom of expression (regarding all aspects, not solely damages). The said obligation is long overdue.
22. Canada has an obligation to remove all such laws from its criminal code,  an obligation that it appears to be disregarding.
23. Even the “hate propaganda” (s. 318) provision of the Criminal Code, which should be designed to prevent war and genocide, without violating the right of freedom of expression, does not mention the ultimate crime of war of aggression, and is further noncompliant with the Covenant because it does not impose a necessity onus on the state to establish a “direct and immediate connection” to actual “discrimination, hostility, or violence”.  As such, the said provision describes a “crime of expression”, which is subjectively judged by the state, without any objectively defined and justified threshold, while failing to comply with the Covenant requirement imposed by Article 20(1) regarding outlawing war propaganda.
26. Thus, Canada is a well-armed nation for broadly and arbitrarily supressing individual expression, and it does not shy away from jail sentences to achieve its goal of controlling speech.
27. These statutory realities (and the coming “anti-terrorist” legislations) are inconsistent with continuous Supreme Court pronouncements that “the [Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] should be presumed to provide at least as great a level of protection as is found in the international human rights documents that Canada has ratified.”  Given the said pronouncements, we must conclude that Canadian common law of defamation is unconstitutional, not to mention the expression provisions of the Criminal Code.
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”—-John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, to the Parliament of England (published November 23, 1644).
“Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.”—-Samuel Johnson, as quoted in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 1 (1791), p. 335.
“Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being “pushed to an extreme”, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”—-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) Ch. 2, Mill (1985). On Liberty. Penguin. pp. p. 108.
“Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.”—-Charles Bradlaugh, Speech at Hall of Science c.1880 quoted in An Autobiography of Annie Besant; reported in Edmund Fuller, Thesaurus of Quotations (1941), p. 398; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
“The censor is always quick to justify his function in terms that are protective of society. But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression.”—-William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 1966).
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”—-Salman Rushdie, In Good Faith (1990), p. 6.
“As a young constitutional lawyer, I was put to the first amendment test when I was called on to defend racists and neo-Nazis. I really had no choice. Surely now we know that none of us do. Free speech is unequivocal, unpolitical, and indivisible.”—-Eleanor Holmes Norton, “Support for Free Speech”, Congressional Record, Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995), United States House of Representatives, Page H4448.
“Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.”—-Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2010). Nomad: From Islam to America. Knopf Canada. p. 215. ISBN 0307398501.
“Free speech is not speech you agree with, uttered by someone you admire. It’s speech that you find stupid, selfish, dangerous, uninformed or threatening, spoken and sponsored by someone you despise, fear or ridicule. Free speech is unpopular, contentious and sometimes ugly. It reflects a tolerance for differences. If everyone agreed on all things, we wouldn’t need it.”—-Robert J. Samuelson (April 6, 2014). “In politics, money is speech”. Washington Post. Retrieved on April 7, 2014.
32. The impact of cultural correctness bias on the practice of defamation law is also apparent in the conduct of civil liberty associations. Major civil liberty associations in Canada, when intervening in court to defend the principle of freedom of expression, will — in a case involving a controversial defendant whose views conflict with the prevailing culture — insist on stating on the record that the association repudiates the defendant’s views. In other words, these associations are primarily trying to safeguard a sufficient measure of free speech to defend societally sanctioned victims, rather than defending the human right itself of free expression. Agreeing or not agreeing with a defendant’s views is not relevant to defending the principle of freedom of expression, and expressly not agreeing harms both the defendant’s case and the principle. At best, the said conduct is intended to extract favourable consideration by exploiting the court’s cultural correctness bias sensitivity.
Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license”; and they will define and define freedom out of existence.
35. By design, therefore, defamation law serves the interests of those powerful enough to use the courts to oppress critics against the subjective measure of how one is imagined to be perceived, using state-provided coercive means, without any objective and evidence-based determination of extent to which the said oppression or coercion is necessary, effective or unjustly harmful in itself.
 The other value to be balanced in a defamation action is the protection of the reputation of the individual. Although much has very properly been said and written about the importance of freedom of expression, little has been written of the importance of reputation. Yet, to most people, their good reputation is to be cherished above all. A good reputation is closely related to the innate worthiness and dignity of the individual. It is an attribute that must, just as much as freedom of expression, be protected by society’s laws. In order to undertake the balancing required by this case, something must be said about the value of reputation.
37. Thus, there is no onus on the plaintiff beyond convincing the judge that he/she was “defamed” (to the eye of the hypothetical observer), the constitutional “right of freedom of expression” has no special status, and the interests of the two sides must simply be “balanced”, within the accepted framework where both damage and malice of defamation (intent to harm) are presumed. That is the state of Canada’s constitutional protection of freedom of expression, and it is contrary to international law.
39. Defamation law is also inherently hypocritical. On the one hand its jurists and scholars proclaim that its purpose is to protect reputation, and that reputation is a vital human attribute to be cherished by many above all else, while on the other hand a defamation lawsuit is a state-sanctioned ruthless defamation of the defendant, in which state power proclaims guilt regarding unacceptable behaviour and hands down a punishment intended to demonstrate guilt, accompanied by jail if the message is not clear enough.
I. Pre-trial litigation is oppressive. The pre-trial litigation (demand for particulars, discovery examinations, refusals motions, motions to force the conditions of mandatory mediation, mandatory mediation, cross-examinations on affidavits submitted in motions, motions for additional examinations and re-examinations, motions to strike out pleadings, motions for interim injunctions, motions to amend pleadings, motion to strike out a jury notice, motion to impose the format of court transcripts, motion to force case management, motion for summary judgement, motion for trial of an issue, pre-trial hearings, and so on, where each motion is essentially a mini-trial) can be as arduous and costly as a plaintiff can or wants to make it, where (in Ontario) the winning side’s costs are payable by the loser at each step. If the loser cannot pay the costs, then he can be barred from bringing his own motions. The litigation can last many years and can be all-consuming.
II. No protection against asymmetry of means. Limited provincial strategic lawsuit against public participation (“SLAPP”) laws notwithstanding,  there is no general provision to correct for asymmetry of means when a corporation or otherwise wealthy plaintiff sues an ordinary citizen, in what can be years of litigation. Thus, the purely oppressive, intimidating and coercive nature of asymmetric litigation removes any freedom of speech protection that one has on paper.
III. No protection against lawsuits by covert proxies. There is no statutory limit on non-parties to fund a plaintiff’s legal costs, and there is no obligation for a plaintiff to disclose non-party funding. In fact, funding arrangements are considered privileged and cannot easily be discovered. The common law of maintenance and champerty is a weak protection against funding abuse and puts a heavy onus on the party complaining about covert funding to prove legal impropriety. Even government and public institutions can fund private defamation lawsuits of their employees or of any person, and do, not to mention political lobby groups. Thus, without transparency and without limit, there is a systemic condonation of defamation lawsuits by covert proxy.
IV. Disproportionate breadth of liability. The common law of defamation allows the plaintiff to sue everyone or anyone that is involved in a publication that is alleged to be defamatory, including: the author of the words, the printer, the publisher, the book store, the delivery man, the web site, the software provider for the web venue, the server hosting the web site, the service provider, the host of an on-line forum, the social media user that did not block or delete a comment, and so on. Even a search engine can be sued for the display of search results, or a bulletin board for the display of automatic listings. The plaintiff can select targets from all these possibilities. Thus, defamation law attacks publication venues by forcing them to monitor and censor, which can be resource intensive, thereby closing down discussion forums. The chill effect on book publishers and specialized forum providers, in particular, is significant. If the publication involves speaking to a crowd with a voice amplification device, then, in principle, the provider of the amplification system and the venue can be sued. Thus, the reach of defamation actions goes far beyond the originating communicator, to any knowing or unknowing “enabler”, which is a disproportionate measure if ever there was one.
V. Effectively no time-limitation barring of litigation. There is no time limitation for a defamation action against re-publication of the same words or pamphlet or book or blogpost alleged to be defamatory. In the Canadian common law, every re-publication is considered a fresh event. This could include a new printing of a book made decades after the original printing, even if no defamation action had been made against the first printing. It could include a newspaper that puts its paper archive on the internet, and so on. With internet material, the plaintiff can argue that the words complained of are continuously being published as long as they are on the internet: he need only show one new viewing of the material.
VI. No equality of arms, by design. At trial, damages, intent and falsity are presumed, and there is no regulatory or statutory limit on character assassination of the defendant. The in-court motion and trial hearings are a legally protected venue where defamation of the defendant is, in practice, given free reign. That defamation can be published, based on the open court principle, and is not actionable. In contrast, the common law foresees that the entire in-court conduct of the defence is evidence to show malice towards awarding aggravated damages. Even advancing the defence of truth, if it fails, is evidence of malice for awarding aggravated damages, which are routinely thus awarded. In practice, the presumption of malice of defamation (intent) is extended to a presumption of malice of defence. The absence of a retraction or of an apology is also weighed negatively in awarding damages. By design, there is no equality of arms (equal access to justice) in a defamation lawsuit in Canada.
VIII. Jury is directed away from considering the right of freedom of expression. In the charge to the jury, the judge typically constrains himself to the determinations prescribed by the common law of defamation, and is thus required to explain the test for liability in defamation, and the tests for applicable and pleaded defences, but he is not required to describe the constitutional right of freedom of expression — the fundamental human right that is always attacked in a defamation lawsuit. Despite the Supreme Court’s lofty statements about “balancing” reputation and the constitutional right of freedom of expression, the trial judge need never explain or describe or name the constitutional right that is in play. As a result, the jury is guided to a technical determination without being invited to ponder the societal and Charter value of freedom of expression. Typically, if the defendant attempts to bring the law of freedom of expression, then the judge instructs the jury to disregard any legal argument made by the litigants, and that he is the only authority on the legal framework.
IX. Judge can opine on quantum of damages, prior to jury’s determination of liability. In the charge to the jury, judges have been allowed in common law to express their opinions in characterizing the amount of non-pecuniary (and unproven) damages that would be warranted if a determination of liability for defamation is made, or to give “guidance” as to recommended ranges of damages.
X. Financial barrier to bringing the appeal. After trial, if the defendant wishes to appeal, as a condition for bringing the appeal, the defendant must, under the rules of procedure, secure a transcript of the trial.  The costs of producing the transcript, which the defendant must assume, can typically be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and must be paid prior to securing the transcripts.
43. In pivotal historic periods, such as after the US war of independence, and after the Second World War, establishment forces enact strong freedom legislation in order to prevent recurrence of abuse of power. This is then followed by an erosion of freedom that accompanies gradual rising centralization and hierarchical control (monopolies, globalization, centralization, etc.). Both statutes and the case law follow these meta-trends, and the courts always represent the interests of centralized power, from which the judiciary is ordained. The statutes themselves represent a “balance of the period” between significant freedom and safeguards for the newly enacted power structure. In addition, there is an effort to ground and consolidate the statutes by establishing underlying moral principles, such as a right to life, a protection against torture, and a prohibition of genocide.
44. In this regard, the “societal value of reputation” is a call to discipline and to preservation of undemocratic power, whereas freedom of expression is a call to shake it up and interact in order to find meaning and influence by testing boundaries. Reputation is the force behind subservience to authority. Expression is the force of change and of resistance against unjustified control. Claims of hurt feelings and irreparable personal integrity, from expressed opinions or in an absence of proven actual damage, should carry no weight in the constant class struggle between reputation and free expression, which is a central business in democratic societies.
47. One aspect, in particular, of the Covenant illustrates how the ill-conceived task of negotiating the struggle between freedom and hierarchical control leads to incongruence. On the one hand, the Covenant prescribes that the right to hold an opinion is absolute,  while, on the other hand, the Covenant allows written defamation laws (that follow the strict requirements of necessity and proportionality) “[f]or respect of the rights or reputations of others”.  What is the meaning of an absolute right to hold an opinion if one does not have an absolute right to express the opinion, with the obvious understanding that an opinion, by definition, is distinct from an order or directive, and cannot be true or false?
48. Why would a gag law be needed “for respect of the … reputations of others”? Instead, a sound principle that is consistent with an absolute right to hold an opinion would be to presume that those closest (in influence) to the person will make their judgement of the person from direct knowledge rather than from expressed third-party opinions, and that those that form judgement on the basis of hearsay opinion are distant and irrelevant.
50. To those jurists who react by claiming that society would collapse without defamation law, I would answer along the following lines. A merchant’s reputation is determined by the quality of his wares and services, and is thus robustly protected against opinions expressed by competitors and their clients. Allowing widespread defamation in advertisement has not caused a collapse of commerce, and consumers have adapted their judgments to suit their needs and desires. Likewise, allowing widespread defamation in the political discourse of representative politics has not caused a meltdown of democracy, and has not been the cause of systemic loss of democracy. The same is true among individuals in modern society. If defamation on the internet were such a poisonous substance, then surely modern civilization would have extinguished itself by mass suicide and gang wars by now. I would add that the iconic teen suicide is caused by deep societal problems, leading to bullying, isolation, and low self-esteem, not by insults and defamation. Freedom of expression is needed to solve those very societal problems, at the root. If the world allowed adults free expression, free expression would be practiced in all spheres, and teens would be more resilient. More expression is the answer, not suppression of expression.
51. Socrates has already answered the jurists. Defamation kills the gadfly and thereby kills society. The mule simply becomes stupid and lethargic. Democracy becomes a parody. And we become run and overrun by idiots who suffer from not having their self-images regularly challenged by stinging defamatory comments.
(a) The presumptions of falsity, malice, and damages should be abolished.
(b) The plaintiff should have an onus to prove actual damage to reputation, falsity in the case of a statement of fact, and actual malice (intent to inflict actual damage) or consequential negligence.
(d) Other remedies should include publishing corrections, and providing an equivalent venue for response.
(e) There should be a complete bar against government and corporate plaintiffs, and a disclosure rule regarding third-party funding of the litigants.
(f) Forum and medium providers should be excluded from any liability.
(g) There should be a time-limitation bar, irrespective of re-publishing.
(h) Conduct of the defence should be separate from the cause of action, and unusable in proving the charge.
(i) The purpose of the statute should include protections against asymmetry of means, protection against social correctness bias, protections against using secrecy from privilege (including more probing discovery and transparency rules) to cover defamation attacks by defendants who have structural power over plaintiffs, and should take into account aggravating circumstances from structural power relations between the litigants.
(j) There should be no systemic barriers to access, to litigation and to appeal, for a litigant defending his/her right of freedom of expression.
53. There should not be civil liability for a person’s emotional or stress response to words. Such liability is disproportionate. Actual damage to reputation already covers all the circumstances where the words caused an effect on the plaintiff, through the responses of persons that change their relation to the plaintiff. Evidence of actual damage to reputation includes: loss of employment, not being promoted, loss of career development, loss of work assignments, loss of clients or contracts, loss of income, loss of memberships to clubs and groups, loss of friends, being barred from social circles, loss of social, public and business opportunities, loss of relationships, loss of access to public participation, and so on, to the full extent that these carry pecuniary consequences.
54. Put another way, being “mean” with words that do not project structural (hierarchical) power should not be punishable in itself. Being “mean” and emotional responses including stress are intrinsic to human interactions. Suppressing these elements suppresses the individual’s influence in society, and produces a managerial dystopia rather than a healthy society of constantly colliding views and interests. Human motivation and perception are moulded by emotional responses, which alone can cause re-examination of self-image and identity. It is, at best, an irrational and unjustified project of social engineering to attempt to erase hurt feelings and stress reactions to words, by suppressing the speaker.
 Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto,  2 SCR 1130, 1995 CanLII 59 (SCC), <http://canlii.ca/t/1frgn>: para. 141, and see paras. 83 to 140; para. 208, and see paras. 205 to 207.
 Bayer proposes that the plaintiff should, contrary to the common law of defamation, be required to prove that the words complained of are false, did indeed cause damage to reputation, and that the defendant acted with actual malice or negligence: Carolin Anne Bayer, Re-thinking the common law of defamation: Striking a new balance between freedom of expression and the protection of the individual’s reputation, thesis, Master of Laws, University of British Columbia, 2001, <https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/-1.0077572>. See also: Hilary Young, “But names don’t necessarily hurt me: Considering the effect of disparaging statements on reputation”, Queen’s Law Journal, 37:1, 2011, <http://www.queensu.ca/lawjournal/sites/-webpublish.queensu.ca.qljwww/files/files/issues/pastissues/Volume37a/1-Young.pdf>.
 WIC Radio Ltd. v. Simpson,  2 SCR 420, 2008 SCC 40 (CanLII), <http://canlii.ca/t/1z46d>, para. 67, and see paras. 68 to 80 (dissenting analysis).
 Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto,  2 SCR 1130, 1995 CanLII 59 (SCC), <http://canlii.ca/t/1frgn>: para. 168, and see paras. 167 to 203.
 Evidence of actual damage to reputation includes: loss of employment, not being promoted, loss of career development, loss of work assignments, loss of clients or contracts, loss of income, loss of memberships to clubs and groups, loss of friends, being barred from social circles, loss of social, public and business opportunities, loss of relationships, loss of access to public participation, and so on.
 “Non-pecuniary damages” are damages from emotional reactions and stress, which are not quantified or are not quantifiable, and which do not correspond to an objectively determined loss of income or anything having marketable monetary value.
 Ter Neuzen v. Korn,  3 SCR 674, 1995 CanLII 72 (SCC), http://canlii.ca/t/1frhk, para. 104, and see dissenting view.
 At Article 20(2) of the Covenant. The French is clearer: “Article 20 : 1. Toute propagande en faveur de la guerre est interdite par la loi. 2. Tout appel à la haine nationale, raciale ou religieuse qui constitue une incitation à la discrimination, à l’hostilité ou à la violence est interdit par la loi.” Article 20 delimitates all such “hate speech” laws allowed and required by the Covenant.
 “The Apology (Greek: Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους; Apologia Sokratous, Latinized as Apologia Socratis) is Plato’s version of the speech given by Socrates as he defended himself in 399 BC against the charges of “corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel”.”—Wikipedia (accessed on 26 January 2016).
 D.M. Katz et al., “Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate”, Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 61, No. 1, August 2011, p. 1-28.
 In: Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth in 1914, in the essay “Anarchism & American Traditions”; which is a position that is in accord with the First Amendment (1791) of the US constitution: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”.
 As noted above, evidence of actual damage to reputation includes: loss of employment, not being promoted, loss of career development, loss of work assignments, loss of clients or contracts, loss of income, loss of memberships to clubs and groups, loss of friends, being barred from social circles, loss of social, public and business opportunities, loss of relationships, loss of access to public participation, and so on; such that pecuniary value can be ascribed in determining “actual” damage if there is a proven causal link.
 The said “contract” is the rational basis for limited freedom in modern societies that institute forms of democratic representation (the so-called “free and democratic” societies of Western jurisprudence).
 The plethora of exaggerated claims of near-infinite harm from internet postings is noteworthy. Plaintiffs’ counsels in defamation cases have been repeatedly arguing that internet publications are more damaging to reputation than conventional publications, without any basis in social science studies, without expert evidence, in legal circumstances where damage to reputation is presumed, and without considering the known counter arguments of “link rot”, information overload, the ease of responding in the same venue, the inherent low reputation and recognized unreliability of both blogs and general internet information, and so on. And judges have been happy to go along.
 Covenant, at Article 19, para. 3.
 J.C. Sipe, “”Old Stinking, Old Nasty, Old Itchy Old Toad”*: Defamation Law, Warts and All (A Call for Reform)”, Indiana Law Review, 2008, vol. 41:137, pages 137-160.

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