Quote:
Originally Posted by Aldo
So lets say you are a disgruntled employee working for company x or a spurned lover of the director and you want to get up to misschief, what better way than to post on an expat type forum about how cr4p their service is.
Not saying you are..  |
Hi Aldo
Please don't inflame this wretched issue.
The legal fact is that Governments nowadays are so blinking wet that if Bloggs says something about Smith on the Internet that Smith objects to - believing (or at any rate claiming) that what Bloggs said might damage Smith's reputation in some way - Smith can now sue both the person who made the allegation in the first place and the owner of the forum on which the allegation is published, plus modern international Internet-driven legislation gives Smith a choice of jurisdictions in which to sue.
Your own words are that somebody might wish to "Get up to mischief." For exactly this reason, recent legislation forbids the idea unless the joint Defendants are willing to risk having to pay both punitive and exemplary damages, plus costs.
The history of the new legislation (some of it, anyway) is that the pharmaceutical companies wield HUGE anounts of commercial, political and international clout. (Tell Google to find "Defamation + Internet forums + Law" - without the quotation marks - and you can bore yourself rigid for hours reading all about the leading cases which led to this gutless legislation. I did so, so I can assure you of how boring it is, but please don't take my word for it.)
Apparently PharmCo produced a Wundadrug - or so they claimed. A dozen eminent Scientists tested the Wundadrug independently - or at any rate claimed that they had. According to the Scientists, the Wundadrug was about as much use as a teaspoon of sugar as far as curing whatever the thing was supposed to cure went. These Scientists had International Clout. Govts would not buy the Wundadrug if the Scientists were right. PharmCo had spent zillions developing the Wundadrug, expecting Govts everywhere to flock to buy it and then sell it on to their Citizens via their subsidised healthcare schemes etc, so PharmCo were well & truly Riled when the Scientists allegedly said, "A cuppa with sugar in it will be equally ineffective by way of a cure but the cuppa will probably improve the Patient's humour much better than this hideously expensive - and hideously hopeless -Wundadrug ever could." !
PharmCo therefore sued the Scientists and won. Legislation followed. Legislation being the cosh that it is, it translates down to tiny, trivial (in world terms) incidents like this one as well. I doubt very much that this was ever the real intention, but Sprat suing Minnow actually doesn't cost a lot less than PharmCo suing Scientists when push comes to shove because the depth of the respective pockets involved is relevant too.
I think the Law is an Ass, a Bachelor, Daft & Inequitable in this particular context - Tracey ad the Removers - but there is no way that Tim and I can get the law changed about it, plainly. Tim didn't write this gibberish new legislation - neither did I - and we do not have enough of a Voice to be able to get any of it altered, unfortunately.
On ANY sensible view of it there should be "de minimis" provisions in it precisely because the Internet is so utterly vague and anonymous except for the occasional - and very rare - situation where something like the Wundadrug is involved and everyone involved is a world-eminent protagonist in the relevant field.
Without in any way wishing to trivialise Tracey's issue - whichis enormous to her and quite rightly so - Government Health Budgets do not depend on the blinking outcome of her own problem with the removers. The absnce of commonsense de minimis provisions is a grave indictment of the Parliamentary Draftsmen who penned this rubbish and the MPs who failed to inject some common-sense protections for Joe Ordinary into it, if you ask me. The Australian and British Govts have both signed up to this gibberish, as have the American Government and the EU.
Don't believe for a second that the protagnists would not be able to discover Tracey's real identity. A search of Google for Anton Piller Order will reveal everything you need to know about that. On the thread about the family who eventually found one another, you remarked (rightly) that the Internet can be used in pretty sinister ways and you are definitely not wrong about that.
"Gawd 'Elp Us All From Textbook Politicians and Judges With Absolutely No Concept of Real Life" is about all one can say, I suggest! (I reckon that most Judges have rotten sex-lives. Who wants to sleep with a dessicated old fossil, after all? But that probably doesn't do a lot to improve the humour of the average Judge! Meanwhile, Politicians are ambitious and industrious bed-leapers if the memoirs of their enemies are believed!)
Cheers
Gill
Apparently the groupage will arrive 11th January...seeing is believing ay???? Still cant believe they split my stuff up like that (anyone who is reading this and hasnt got a clue what i'm on about them please read first thread>>>"Don't Use ********"
