Sally Bercow *innocent face*, you are wronged. You have to find damages and lawyer costs for a tweet which the courts under libel said was a defamation of Lord McAlpine. Who judged the facts of that case: a judge. There was no jury to decide what the meaning of your tweet was. No jury on Read More
Month: May 2013
Future results show magazines not out of the woods
It may have been too much to hope for three quite good results in a row from the magazine industry. Future Publishing has followed Centaur and Reed with its interim results. Both Centaur and Reed were quite upbeat, giving some hope that the long recession may be nearing its end. Future’s results are less positive. Read More
Who owns the contacts you’ve made on LinkedIn when you leave the job?
Really good question at a conference where I spoke about the new libel law this week for Conscious Solutions. Not about libel but about ownership of LinkedIn contacts. The same question has been asked in one of our face-to-face courses. Question: who owns the contacts you make on LinkedIn while you are employed by a Read More
Libel: out with the old and in with the new in Defamation Act 2013
It’s out with the old and in with the new for English and Welsh libel as a result of the Defamation Act. In comes: The need for the claimant to prove the statement caused serious harm or is likely to cause serious harm; The need for a profit-making operation to prove the statement caused serious Read More
Belfast and Dublin to be new centres for libel after Act in England and Wales
It’s all very well for the new Defamation Act to be enforced in England and Wales with its new stronger defences. But libel is always a race to the bottom: where can the claimant/plaintiff sue and have a higher chance of winning? The answer now is in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The Northern Read More