{"id":13091,"date":"2012-01-16T10:17:56","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T15:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13091"},"modified":"2012-01-16T10:17:56","modified_gmt":"2012-01-16T15:17:56","slug":"cory-doctorow-recommends-a-book-on-english-libel-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/16\/cory-doctorow-recommends-a-book-on-english-libel-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Cory Doctorow recommends a book on English libel law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a reason that individuals and organizations try to <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2012\/01\/16\/you-cant-read-this-book.html\" target=\"_blank\">sue for libel<\/a> under English law, rather than their own national legal system:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The <em>Guardian<\/em> published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen&#8217;s forthcoming <em>You Can&#8217;t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom<\/em>, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel law, where &#8220;money buys silence&#8221; for some of the world&#8217;s most notorious dictators, thieves, and bad guys. English libel law is so broad that it allows, for example, Russian oligarchs to sue Russian newspapers for punitive sums (&#8220;the cost of libel actions in England and Wales is 140 times higher than the European average&#8221;) in an English court, merely by demonstrating that someone, somewhere in England looked at the paper&#8217;s website. And yet, the libel law in England and Wales doesn&#8217;t actually protect people from the most common forms of libelous publication: false declarations of criminal suspicion by the police, false claims of financial irregularities from credit reporting bureaux and false statements in former employers&#8217; reference letters are protected unless they can be shown to have been malicious and negligent. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a reason that individuals and organizations try to sue for libel under English law, rather than their own national legal system: The Guardian published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen&#8217;s forthcoming You Can&#8217;t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel law, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,9,28],"tags":[459,570,186,270,213],"class_list":["post-13091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-law","category-media","tag-censorship","tag-england","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-libel","tag-newspapers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3p9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13091"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13092,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13091\/revisions\/13092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}