Site Supposedly Sued For Just Linking To A Story That Potentially Libels Someone (original) (raw)

from the oh-come-on dept

On Friday, we wrote about a guy who worked for the Green Party in Canada who was suing a whole bunch of sites, claiming libel. The problem was that he was suing sites like Google and Wikipedia for what its users had done — rather than the users themselves. In our comments, people pointed out that he’s apparently also sued Yahoo, MySpace and PBWiki (though, we haven’t seen anything to back that up Update: I’ve now seen the documents showing the claims against Yahoo and MySpace). The original story about this was in The Globe and Mail, though plenty of other sources picked up on it as well. One was the site P2Pnet.net, where Jon Newton wrote up a blog post about the lawsuits… and 15 minutes later was sued himself. Yikes. Newton notes that the only thing he did in his post was link to the potentially libelous post, which hardly seems worthy of getting sued yourself. Reporting on a libel suit doesn’t seem like it should make you liable for libel as well. Once again, all this is really doing is getting a lot more attention focused on this guy rather than hiding his critics. It’s difficult to see how that’s helpful.