…now that everybody in the universe is linking to this post, and proudly listing us among those brave souls willing to stand up in defense of free speech…

…um…

…I’d just like to make clear that PERSONALLY, UNLIKE ADAM, I have the utmost respect and admiration for Mr. Usmanov.

In particular, I wish to express my admiration for Mr. Usmanov’s skillful and handsome team of lawyers. They, and he, are wonderful souls, paragons of decency, sportsmanship, and above all, restraint. That last being, surely, the most admirable of all human virtues.

The UK libel laws, combined with a lack of something akin to the US first ammendment, strikes me as unusually intolerable for a free people. Of course, the UK probably still has habeus corpus and anti-torture provisions. So win some loose some, I guess. Then again, we don’t have ASBOs. Or a growing government controlled public security camera system, a la V for Vendetta. So, I’ll stay here I think.

You’re the sort who’d want to cut and run whilst defying the constitutional option.

Also, I am pretty sure that you don’t like apple pie, either.

You have to provide evidence. Of course, if you can, you won’t end up screwed paying lawyers, which you will if winners generally pay all or some of their own costs. I’d rather have it that way than have it so that I can be right, win and still end up out of pocket. What did I do to deserve that?

The case that got so much attention, with the CUP book, was a balls-up by CUP. When they looked at what they were publishing, they knew it too, so they rolled over straight away.

If you’re levying a charge against somebody, my thinking is, you should be able to prove that said charge has substance before it even gets INTO a question of who’s right. But that’s me.

The problem, it seems to me, is less that ISPs are liable (I’m kind of thinking they should be, at least on some level), it’s the huge weight that the mere threat of a libel charge carries, to the point where it’s always going to make more sense to roll over straight away, regardless of how right you are or may be. That will apply, as I said, to bloggers as well as ISPs. We’re hosted in the UK, I don’t make it practice to say things that I’m not able to back up, but are you or anybody else going to stick your neck out on my behalf if somebody comes to us threating to sue? No matter how right I am? I’m not going to stick my OWN neck out on that front, and who can blame me?

It would be nice to have available some sort of buffer in those cases, is all I’m saying. Say, a presumption that speech is worth protecting unless a plaintiff can give good reason why not.