Online: Slander or Libel?

A nice outbreak of sanity, here:

A High Court judge ruled this week that defamatory comments on internet forums are more like slander than libel, a judgement that could make success in such cases more difficult. Mr Justice Eady found that posts on internet discussion groups such as website bulletin boards are closer to spoken conversations than to published articles, being casual and characterised by "give and take".

Slander is defamation through speech, while libel is defamation through written means, such as a newspaper article. In the UK, it is significantly easier to win damages for libel than for slander.

Trivial Defamation

One of the unanswered questions is to what extent web sites/blogs need to worry about defamatory postings made by their users. Here's a little legal sanity from the UK:

In a move sure to please football fans arguing the toss on bulletin boards all over the UK, a High Court judge has ruled that lively banter of a “strictly defamatory” nature can still be so trivial that The Man can’t always force board owners into revealing poster’s identities.

God bless pragmatism.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Openness

How's this for a stunning demonstration that the UK Government has something to hide on ID cards?

Treasury officials are ordering the immediate destruction of "Gateway" internal reports into risky government IT schemes to prevent information on the projects being leaked.

...

The order for the destruction of final reports will fuel suspicion that they identify fundamental flaws in some major government IT-based projects.

The paper also tells civil servants they must securely dispose immediately after delivery of the final Gateway report “all supporting documents”.

The Information Commissioner ruled last year that early Gateway reviews on ID cards should be published, arguing that it should be public knowledge whether the programme was feasible and being well managed. The OGC appealed – and lost. It is now to fund a third appeal hearing, this time to the High Court.

Openness? We don't need no stinkin' openness.

Fab M'Lud: Sanity Breaks Out in UK Court

This is such a good judgment by the Court of Apeal:

General ideas and structures behind computer games and programs can be copied as long as the source code and graphics are not, the UK's Court of Appeal has ruled.

The judgment upholds an earlier High Court ruling in a case involving three computer games simulating pool. Under UK copyright law and EU Directives, the court ruled that the ideas behind the games cannot be protected by copyright, because copyright does not protect general ideas.

"Merely making a program which will emulate another but which in no way involves copying the program code or any of the program's graphics is legitimate," said Lord Justice Jacob, who gave the Court's ruling.

This really gets to the heart of what a program is - code - and where the originality lies - in the details of its coding, which is protected by copyright, not patent law.

Fab, M'Lud.

British Judges - Gawd Bless 'Em

Here's a interesting little tale of two nations sharing a common tongue but divided by patent culture:

In the US the courts found that Smith had infringed the patents in its use of similar designing software and ordered that it remove certain functions from its software.

The English court took a rigorous approach to analysing the patents and found that it did not adequately describe the system it sought to patent. In order to be valid a patent must describe a process so completely that a person who knows that subject area must be able to replicate it using only the contents of the patent.

The High Court found that Halliburton's patent did not do that, and the Court of Appeal has now agreed. Justice Jacob ruled that the patent was missing vital details, contained wrong equations, demanded a higher level of expertise than allowed and that it relied on material external to the patent, and therefore was not a valid patent.

Shot, sir!

A pity they didn't just chuck it on the basis you can't patent software, but at least the bewigged gents "took a rigorous approach."