"I didn't know if you'd heard about this Canadian law suit," wrote to us one member of Techrights. "I couldn't remember reading anything about it on Techrights. Anyway, it seems serious, so I thought I'd send it, just in case...maybe a mention of this law suit on Techrights will get more folks to help out.
...The scales of justice aren’t balanced by what’s right and fair. They’re balanced by how much money a given party can drop onto them. And I don’t have enough money to get there and back.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the case is the most important in the history of the internet in Canada because if Crookes wins, there won’t be an internet in Canada.
“We’ve pointed in the past to some rather ridiculous situations in Canada concerning libel law”, said Mike Masnick on TechDirt, recently, going on >>>
One key case involved a guy named Wayne Crookes, who not only sued major internet sites like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and MySpace for hosting content he believed to be defamatory towards himself, but he also sued Jon Newton of the site P2Pnet.net for merely linking to the content Crookes believed to be defamatory. A court in Canada eventually ruled that merely linking to potentially defamatory material is not defamation, and an appeals court agreed. Last I heard, the case had moved up to the Canadian Supreme Court.