The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #99402   Message #1980485
Posted By: Richard Bridge
26-Feb-07 - 10:44 PM
Thread Name: BS: Pamela Greenbaum Sues Blogger Orthomom
Subject: RE: BS: Pamela Greenbaum Sues Blogger Orthomom
There is a developing worldwide jurisprudence on defamation forum shopping. Here all parties and the vast preponderance of interested readers are in the US, which militates against non-US jurisdictions.

By UK rules, this would be, if defamatory, libel, not slander.

Also by UK rules much of the comment would be "mere vulgar abuse" not defamatory, but the charge of anti-semitism might well be potentially defamatory, although it puzzles me to see someone called "Greenbaum" accused of anti-semitism, that being at first blush a Jewish name.

I also thought I remembered a fairly recent thread in which Rabbi-sol supported the efforts of a religious block-vote to make a school board sell assets to drive the cost to the community of the school board down, so I'm thinking it might be inconsistent here for him to defend the right of a religous block vote to drive the cost of the school board up.

I also find the construct "bigoted anti-semite" odd. Is the blogger implying that there are anti-semites who are not bigoted?

And finally, where does Google come in? DO they host the blog, or is it simply that there search engine caches parts of the blog? They just lost somewhere (I think it might have been Holland) on the basis that thier caching of parts of newspaper articles was an infringment of copyright, so that might be an indication that their search results amount to republication of the libel if there was a libel, but the UK case over the Motley Fool might indicate that once they are on notice of the defamation then if they do not delete it from their results they are publishers of it (if it is defamatory).