02 Mar 12 | Uncategorized
A former Conservative council candidate has lost in his attempt to sue Google for hosting “defamatory” comments on a blog.
Payam Tamiz, who was ditched as a council candidate in Thanet, Kent, after being found to have referred to local women as “sluts” on Facebook, claimed that Google was the publisher of the comments, hosted on the company’s Blogger platform. Mr Justice Eady rejected this notion and refused to allow Tamiz continue the case.
The troubles of one misguided young politico don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but Tamiz has inadvertently established something quite important here. Google and other internet service providers cannot be considered publishers.
Publishing is a conscious act, and even with all the resources in the world, Google could not publish all the content that appears on its platforms every day.
This is not the first time someone has tried to sue Google as a publisher. In Spain, attempts have been made to hold Google responsible for content that appears on government and newspaper websites. Meanwhile, former motorsports chief Max Mosley is attempting to sue the company in 22 separate jurisdictions.
The judgment chimes with the government’s latest publication on libel reform, which recommends that ISPs be recognised as conduits rather than publishers in any dispute. Mr Justice Eady has taken a lot of criticism from the press in the past, but this is an excellent decision.
10 Feb 12 | Leveson Inquiry
As the first module of the Leveson Inquiry drew to a close yesterday, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre refused to retract a statement accusing actor Hugh Grant of “mendacious smears” against his company unless Grant agreed to take back the “toxic and explosive” statements made about the Mail.
In a heated debate Dacre and David Sherborne, counsel for the core participant victims, discussed answerphone messages left for Grant from a “plummy-voiced woman,” described in a 2007 Mail on Sunday article. In his evidence to the Inquiry in November, Grant suggested that the information for the story, which suggested his relationship with Jemima Khan was on the rocks, could only have been accessed by phone hacking.
Dacre, who was recalled to give evidence on the issue for a second time this week, said: “Our group did not hack phones and I rather resent your continued insinuations that we did,” adding that he had given the Inquiry his “unequivocal word” on the matter earlier in the week.
Dacre accused Sherborne of “attacking my group rather unpleasantly”. Referring to Grant as the “poster boy for Hacked Off,” Dacre went on to add that the actor “is obsessed by trying to drag the Daily Mail into another newspaper’s scandal.”
Lord Justice Leveson Leveson suggested that the editor may need to appear before the Inquiry again at a later date. Dacre replied: ” I have shown this week I am prepared to devote a lot of time to this.”
Heather Mills, who also appeared before the Inquiry yesterday, said she had “never” played voicemail recordings to former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan. In his evidence to the Inquiry last December, Morgan claimed he had heard voicemail tapes, in which Mills’ then partner Sir Paul McCartney sang an apology and asked for forgiveness, that had been obtained legitimately, but he refused to “compromise” his source.
Mills added: “I couldn’t quite believe that he would even try to insinuate [that], a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years, would relish in telling the court if I had played a voicemail message to him.”
The court also heard how Mills had recorded over 64 hours of footage of alleged harassment from journalists, including evidence, shown to the court of a car chase involving paparazzi which resulted in a crash.
Thursday’s session also focused on bullying within the journalism industry, hearing a number of anonymous testimonies from reporters. Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) presented 12 written accounts to the court, detailing “tremendous pressure,” “macho culture” and other “degrading” treatment.
One testimony described a journalist being forced to write “anti-Islam stories”, and being called the “token lefty” when they complained. The journalist described being “in tears” at the treatment, but explained that it continued.
Another said: “three or four staff suffered physical collapses, almost certainly to some extent as a result of the stress.”
Former News of the World news editor Ian Edmondson also described a “culture of bullying” at the newspaper, explaining that “you will do what you are told”. Edmondson said that everything was dictated by the editor and explained editor Colin Myler, who replaced Andy Coulson following his resignation in 2007, continued the newsroom bullying.
Edmondson also denied drafting emails sent by Neville Thurlbeck, former chief reporter of the News of the World, to women involved in an orgy with ex-motorsports boss Max Mosley in 2008, though he added it was “more likely that I would have asked” Thurlbeck to contact them.
Edmondson told the Inquiry he believed the emails to be a “threat”, chiming with the inference of Mr Justice Eady that the messages amounted to blackmail, as suggested in the judgment following Mosley’s successful privacy action against the News of the World in the same year.
He was also quizzed about extracts of Kate McCann’s diary that appeared in the paper in 2008, contradicting claims made by Myler that Edmondson had sought permission to publish from the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell. Asked if he had led editor Myler to believe he had “made it clear” to Mitchell that the paper had the whole diary and planned to publish parts, Edmondson replied: “No.”
Appearing via video link, Darryn Lyons of photo agency Big Pictures, explained that his photographers tried to stay in line with the PCC code, but added that photographers, picture agencies, and publishers no longer know where they stood in the industry.
“Celebrities court publicity when they want to, and all of a sudden they want to switch it off. I don’t agree people should be hounded up and down the street. I do agree people should be photographed in public places, we have a free press and a free press should be able to work in public places,” he said.
When asked about the legal case against his group brought by actress Sienna Miller regarding photographs taken of her on holiday, Lyons said that paparazzi had been taking pictures of people on holiday since “Brigitte Bardot was seen sunning herself on the beaches of St Tropez”.
PR veteran Max Clifford told the Inquiry that he had agreed his own hacking settlement with former NotW editor Rebekah Brooks over a “quiet lunch in Mayfair.” Clifford agreed to £220,000 a year for three years plus legal costs, and to provide the newspaper with tip-offs.
Clifford said he believed the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World and the Leveson Inquiry had “frightened people”. He added that he was aware of “several stories that would have dominated the headlines,” over recent months that had not been published.
The Inquiry will resume with module two, examining the relationship between the press and the police, on 28 February.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
31 Jan 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The former chair of the Press Complaints Commission has made a staunch defence of the self-regulation body at the Leveson Inquiry today.
Sir Christopher Meyer, who chaired the self-regulation body from 2003 to 2009, grew exasperated as he was asked by counsel Robert Jay QC whether the body should stop the press coming up with stories to fit supposed facts. “As long as human beings are involved, there will be fallibility,” Meyer told the Inquiry.
“It is as if you say to the police ‘you are useless because you can’t stop crime’,” Meyer said. “These are ridiculous arguments.”
In one of the more heated sessions of the Inquiry, Meyer told Jay that he seemed “to ignore” that the public has confidence in the complaints body, which has faced criticism in various witness testimony for having failed to deal proactively with complaints. In her evidence to the Inquiry in November, Harry Potter author JK Rowling called it a “wrist-slapping exercise at best”, while the father of missing toddler Madeleine McCann suggested “repeat offenders” of incorrect coverage should lose their privilege of practising journalism.
Meyer contended it was unfair for Jay to suggest he was slow in protecting the McCanns or condemning the Express’s coverage of them. The couple, whose daughter went missing in Portugal in 2007, received a libel payout of £550,000 from Express Newspapers for defamatory articles published about them.
Meyer said he had made it “perfectly plain” to Gerry McCann that he had an option of taking a legal route or the PCC, stressing to the Inquiry that the PCC made “particular efforts” to make itself available to the McCanns within 48 hours of their daughter, Madeleine, disappearing.
He added that he told the then-editor, Peter Hill, “you have to resign” after the payout.
He continued, “the McCanns needed the press for publicity’s sake”, adding that the couple had made a “Faustian” bargain with the media.
He also rejected Jay’s suggestion that, had the PCC taken a more proactive stance with the McCanns, the libellous coverage of Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies would not have been able to go so far.
“Don’t drag me down that path,” he told Jay, noting that he was no longer the PCC chairman at the time, and that the body had been successful in containing media scrums.
Quizzed about why the PCC did not call in newspaper editors in the wake of the Information Commissioner’s reports on Operation Motorman, Meyer said he needed “actionable information” and wanted to “see the beef” before talking to editors.
Last month, the former Information Commissioner Richard Thomas told the Inquiry the PCC “should have done more” in response to the Motorman findings, and that he “just did not buy [the] line”, that the PCC could not intervene because the use of private investigators by the press was a criminal matter.
Discussing the oft-criticised PCC report on phone hacking in 2007, published after the jailing of Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman on related offences, Meyer argued it was not useful for the PCC to “duplicate” the police inquiry, and that interviewing former News of the World editor Andy Coulson would not have added “anything of value” to the report.
He said the PCC decided to conduct a “lessons-learned exercise” to shed a “little more light” on what had occurred at the News of the World. Meyer called the report “monumental” and said the police and papers uncovered more evidence of phone hacking than was known in 2006.
His exchange with Robert Jay QC became more agitated as they moved on to Max Mosley, who sued the News of the World in 2008 for publishing a story accusing him of engaging in a Nazi-themed orgy.
Meyer said Mosley was “extremely rude” about the PCC after he decided to launch a legal complaint against the News of the World, adding later that “the whole thing might have taken a different course” had Mosley had gone to the PCC before the tabloid published its sting. “We around the table — the commissioners — would have had a very interesting debate,” Meyer said, adding, “we would have found for him.”
He added that the PCC could have attempted to halt the publication of Mosley sting, as the body “regularly” gave pre-publication advice and there would have been a “big debate” about whether the Nazi theme of the story “affected the central argument”.
Meyer grew increasingly frustrated when asked if there was “collusion” between the PCC and editors serving on its board.
“God knows I had my conflicts with the editors on all kinds of things,” he told the Inquiry. “If you think I was sitting in their pocket not daring to do things that they did not like, think again Mr Jay.”
Meyer gave a staunch defence of free expression, noting that he was a “strong believer of freedom of the press” and “very firmly of the view that you do not go down the road of statute”.
Meyer warned that state involvement in press regulation was a “slippery slope”. He argued that in the future a “less permissive, less liberal state” may try to take advantage of existing legislation to do things that “might be offensive to freedom of expression”.
He added that the press is “quite closely hemmed in by statute and code of practice”, adding that he would not not want to see a “system of regulation that is more repressive than need be.” Referring to a 2003 speech, Meyer said he still believed the PCC should not be able to fine newspapers, contrary to current PCC director Stephen Abell’s view expressed yesterday.
Contrasting with the testimony of Abell and former director Tim Toulmin, Meyer said he believed “very firmly” that the PCC was a regulator, noting that “it is regulation unlike anything else”.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
26 Jan 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The director of public policy (EMEA) at Facebook told the Leveson Inquiry today that regulating what people say on the social network would be akin to regulating what people say in the pub.
Richard Allan said it was “important” to distinguish editorial published content from “chatter on the internet”, noting that websites of papers such as the Guardian provide content, while Facebook provides distribution.
Questioned about the website’s oft-debated approach to privacy, Allan said that the purpose of the social network, to which over 50 per cent of Britons over 13 subscribe, is to allow people to connect and “share information with others”. He defended the network’s anti-anonymity policy, arguing using one’s real name made for a more “meaningful” experience.
He told the Inquiry that users should be able to speak freely on the website as long as they obey rules. He noted that the site has clauses on hate speech, pornography and harassment, adding that the “strongest protection” came from its 800 million-strong community of “neighbourhood watch” users.
Earlier today, representatives from Google urged the Inquiry to ensure a distinction between the publisher of content online and the host platform.
“Google is not the internet, and it is also not the only entry point to the internet,” the web giant’s head of corporate communications in the UK, David-John Collins, told the Inquiry. “Whatever robust system you recommend will have to cover all entry points.”
He emphasised that there was a “very essential balance online”, while Daphne Keller, the corporation’s legal chief who appeared alongside Collins today, warned against the “over-breadth” of regulating the internet.
Keller and Collins spoke at length about Google’s policy for removing content. They told the Inquiry that it has removed hundreds of URLs from its search function relating to the News of the World Max Mosley splash, but stressed that that does not mean the content disappears from the web.
Last November Mosley told the Inquiry that search engines were “dangerous”, as they could “stop a story appearing, but don’t or won’t as a matter of principle”. The former motorsports chief revealed he is currently taking litigation action in 22 countries, suing Google in France and Germany, and considering bringing proceedings against Google in California in an attempt to remove certain search results.
Keller said that defamatory material will usually be taken down within days, but if such content is defamatory under UK law it may still be visible for users via google.com, so long as it does not violate US law.
She said it would be impractical for Google to search out potentially defamatory content itself, and said it is “much better” for users if a judgment has been made by a court or legal process that has weighed the evidence.
Also appearing this afternoon was Camilla Wright, co-editor of celebrity news website Popbitch. “You can’t choose when you’re public and choose when you’re private,” Wright said of celebrities, adding that the website had apologised “five to six” times since it was founded.
The Inquiry will resume on Monday.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
