Academics Against Free Speech?
The bloggers over at Harry’s Place have been forced offline after a threatened libel lawsuit.
If you don’t know already, Britain has some of the most outmoded and ridiculous libel laws in the world. They apply to anything that could possibly have been read by a British citizen, and work on the presumption of guilt. There isn’t even a protection against public-interest criticism. They have been used for years to silence and intimidate critics, and they’re frequently used against the careless blogger. As a result, Britain has a booming industry in “libel tourism” where non-British citizens use British courts to sue non-British citizens.
You would think that an academic would consider themselves above such methods, but apparently not in the form of Jenna Delich, who posted a link to the website of former KKK leader David Duke, and is now apparently suing Harry’s Place for reporting it.
Here’s what Harry’s Place have to say.
Harry’s Place may be removed (or rather have it’s DNS disabled) after a ‘complaint’ to the company that our domain name is registered with.
We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this ‘complaint’ originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters.
Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.
This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain.
Nevertheless, a malicious complaint has been made to the company hosting our DNS.
We would like to assure readers of Harry’s Place that we are doing everything we can to prevent a disruption, but that - of course - we will not concede any ground. We have posted nothing defamatory, and we stand by the information we have supplied.
ISPs often run scared of UK libel law and malicious complaints are thus common. Sadly, it is a well known - and usually successful - way of censoring websites which publish truths that they’d rather not be generally known.
We ask our readers and supporters in the meantime to publish this information as widely as possible. The disgraceful tactic of dishonest and malicious complaining should not be allowed to succeed.
Those on the UCU list, please also make this know there.
Please spread the word.
If we go down, email us at harryblog at gee mail dot com for updates.
I haven’t linked to the material myself as I don’t have the inclination to fight a libel case. You can find the original post here.
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[...] website on the UCU activist list, they were threatened with a vexatious lawsuit and had their site taken down for a couple of days. The threat of a libel case evidently failed when she admitted to actually [...]