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Last 3 Posts @ August 21, 2008 2:50:11 PM EDT

Secular sermon (19 mins ago)

I often find that the most interesting discussions of the whole notion of liberty arise when the there are conflicting understandings of what liberties are. Northern I...

Never Trust a Hippy

The world's most difficult question (1 hour, 1 minute ago)

Politicians often have to face tough questioning on a whole range of subjects. But the question 'how many houses do you own?' is not generally regarded as one of the ...

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The new Russian imperialism (1 hour, 28 mins ago)

Robert Horvath takes issue with the parochialism of those who, 'fixated upon the evils of US global hegemony', refuse to see Russian imperialism for what it is: "..."

normblog

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Libel law: protecting bloggers - no comments

Ministry of Truth describes the sorry state of British libel law, and ends with this:
In short, Britain's political bloggers have decided that, whenever free speech is threatened, it is better to hang together than hang separately and, as the libel 'specialists', Schillings, found to their embarrassment when trying to shut down Craig Murray's blog, last year, if you're trying to kill a story then the very last thing you should do is start threatening bloggers with litigation. Few things, if any, offer more of a guarantee that bloggers will close ranks and spread a story as widely as possible, to the extent that it is now considered a matter of simple good manners that whenever a blogger is threatened in such a manner, others should do everything possible to spread the 'offending' statement to which the threat relates as widely as possible.
That's a good way of defending targeted bloggers - well, it's as much as most of us can do - but while I'm sure the help of all those bloggers who assist is greatly appreciated, perhaps there's a case for creating some kind of Union, or Committee, to which bloggers can sign up to as a sign of their commitment to the cause. As these situations are rarely party-political, the extent of the result blogging media-saturation the group could achieve could be very great.

The Union would presumably require a central blog/site to maintain it, plus a handful of plugged-in bloggers from across the political spectrum to watch out for attacks against others, to produce boilerplate posts for all member blogs, site badges, and so on. Going further, there could be a pool of legal resources, a centralised "defence fund", and so on.

I'm not sure if anything like this already exists, but it feels like a good idea.

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