Defamation Bill

Debate between Lord Phillips of Sudbury and Lord Allan of Hallam

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My noble friend said that he could see the point of this and understood the need for some sort of constraint. What would he do, if this is not the right way? What would be the right way of achieving the general purpose?

[Lord Allan of Hallam]

The right way is to keep Clause 5 as it is currently drafted. The Government have done a good job in drafting the scope of this defence as an additional measure to those currently available under the e-commerce directive. It makes sense to have this additional defence. My concern is that Amendment 11 would be an additional burden and further restrict the defence only to websites that have the ability to post a notice in this way. I imagine that a significant number of websites which could avail themselves of the defence in Clause 5 would not be able to do so if there were a requirement to post a notice. I can also imagine instances when such a requirement would be abused. It makes sense to leave it to the website operator, once they have received a complaint, to deal with it under Clause 5 as it is. I also think that it would be sufficient to encourage website operators to post notices when things are contested and they believe that a notice would fit with their environment and be helpful. There are instances when you need to mandate something and instances when you want to encourage it as a model of good practice. In the context of notices, the mandated option is wrong and the good practice option is correct.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

Having spent about three and a half years attempting to reform the law of defamation, and in the light of what happened on the first amendment today, my overriding objective is to get the Bill through. I want to make it clear that I shall not be moving any of the amendments in my name this evening. I say that now in case anyone else, in their sad lives, wishes to do so. Having thought about it, I take the view that the regime as it stands, with regulations, will be perfectly capable of accommodating some of these issues properly and that we are now being overcareful and overprescriptive. I know that it is very unusual for a member of the Bar to indicate that he is under a decree of self-imposed silence, but that is my position.

Defamation Bill

Debate between Lord Phillips of Sudbury and Lord Allan of Hallam

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

To equate the world wide web with a pub discussion is bizarre. The thing about a pub discussion is that it goes no further than the pub and it is all within a context that people understand. The problem with the web is that the defamation can shoot around the world in 24 hours and remain out there for years.

[Lord Allan of Hallam]

I agree with the noble Lord. The new concept has been described. There is a lot of thinking and literature being developed around this. We are talking about private speech in a public space. Essentially, the speech is made in a private tone but the reality is that the speech is publicly accessible, because of the nature of the technology, to anyone in the world. That does not mean that we ignore it, with which I completely agree. In this clause, we are aiming to get towards a sensible way of dealing with that speech and recognising that it is different from the speech traditionally regulated through defamation law, which was speech through editorialised large organisations.