On April 10th, we posted an article about Online Defamation.  This week, a very interesting new online defamation lawsuit  was launched in Canada catching two high-profile defendants: Blogspot.com, Google’s free blog-hosting site, and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. 

The suit was filed by Wayne Crookes who alleges that he suffered defamation at the hands of anonymous posts to those sites.  The question will be whether the operators of the sites can be held liable for defamatory postings.  As we noted in our earlier post, online content-providers such as Google and Wikipedia cannot take advantage of the traditional protections provided to newspaper publishers or broadcasters.  The law in Canada could use some further clarity in this area, and this case may provide it.

 

Calgary – 09:50 MST