Willy the Wizard falters in the US, but can he still pull a rabbit from
The BBC report, “Harry Potter plagiarism case dismissed” (here), will not have escaped the eagle eyes of 1709 Blog readers. The headline refers not to the ongoing litigation in England and Wales between the estate of Adrian Jacobs and the JK Rowling crew, which is set to go to a full trial (see earlier posts on the 1709 Blog here and on the IPKat here) but to its United States counterpart.
I’ve blogged here about the ongoing litigation in England and Wales, and if this decision doesn’t encourage the applicant to settle those proceedings, no doubt I shall blog about the outcome in due course. In the meantime, the US decision is enough to be going on with.
PS: in the title to the 1709 blog post, I wonder where the Wizard is pulling the rabit from?
In the UK, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg (pictured left) has announced significant reforms of Britain’s libel laws, which I consider a very good thing.
During a wide-ranging speech today on civil liberties, he said:
We will be publishing a draft defamation bill in the Spring. We intend to provide a new statutory defence for those speaking out in the public interest, whether they be big broadcasters or the humble blogger. And we intend to clarify the law around the existing defences of fair comment, and justification.
We believe claimants should not be able to threaten claims on what are essentially trivial grounds. We are going to tackle libel tourism. And we’re going to look at how the law can be updated to better reflect the realities of the internet. Separately, we are also going to address the high costs of defamation proceedings. … Our aim is to turn English libel laws from an international laughing stock to an international blueprint.
Welcome though this is, as with many political developments, it is in danger of being overspun or at least oversold. According to yesterday’s Guardian:
…Britain will become the first country to ask parliament to set out its libel laws, and provide greater clarity, his officials said.
TV3 wants end to broadcast media blackout prior to election
Image: Gruenemann via FlickrUPDATED 13.45
TV3 IS “DEMANDING” an end to the moratorium which forbids broadcast media from reporting most political coverage just prior to a general election. …
Currently, a 48-hour moratorium is applied to such reporting on the day prior to polling and on the day the country goes to the polls. … In a statement today, TV3 says … that “there is no legal requirement for the moratorium under Irish law” and that there is no provision in the Broadcast Act of 2009 for such a moratorium. TV3 also questions the legality of the moratorium in relation to the free speech guarantees set out in the Irish Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. …
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland confirmed to TheJournal.ie that they have received the submission for TV3 and are giving it their “full consideration”. A spokesperson for the BAI said that the body is currently working on the final draft code for broadcasting during and in the run-up to the election. (This is the Draft Election Code, which can be viewed in full here) …
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain
In 1885, the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned the year-old book for its “coarse language” — critics deemed Mark Twain’s use of common vernacular (slang) as demeaning and damaging. A reviewer dubbed it “the veriest trash … more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” Little Women author Louisa May Alcott lashed out publicly at Twain, saying, “If Mr. Clemens [Twain’s original name] cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them.” (That the N word appears more than 200 times throughout the book did not initially cause much controversy.) In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York followed Concord’s lead, banishing the book from the building’s juvenile section with this explanation: “Huck not only itched but scratched, and that he said sweat when he should have said perspiration.” Twain enthusiastically fired back, and once said of his detractors: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.” Luckily for him, the book’s fans would eventually outnumber its critics. “It’s the best book we’ve had,” Ernest Hemingway proclaimed. “All American writing comes from that.
I have on this blog regularly discussed the extent to which offensive speech can be restricted. For example, there are many (many) posts on this blog on censorship and blasphemy. Furthermore, I have referred to the censorship of Guillaume Apollinaire (here and here), Carolina Gustavsson, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence (here, here and here), James Joyce, John Latham, Robert Mapplethorpe and Vladimir Nabokov. Moreover, I have analysed the kinds of reasons why this kind of speech should not be censored: free speech means freedom for the thought we hate, even that of David Irving (eg, here, here, here, and here), Jean-Marie le Pen, or Kevin Myers, and even – especially! – in multi-cultural societies, especially – especially!! – online.
I was reminded of all of this by two recent blogposts. …
Robert A. Kahn on “Tragedy, Farce or Legal Mobilization? The Danish Cartoons in Court in France and Canada”
Robert A. Kahn (University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota)) has posted “Tragedy, Farce or Legal Mobilization? The Danish Cartoons in Court in France and Canada” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
Why would anyone prosecute the Danish Cartoons? Even as North Americans and Europeans debated whether the cartoons should have been commissioned by the Jyllands Posten or republished elsewhere, most agreed that prosecutions were totally out of line in a liberal Western state. And, yet, there were prosecutions in both France and Canada. While each prosecution ultimately failed from a legal perspective, both cases also operated on the level of symbolic politics. Here the results were mixed. While the Muslim groups that sued Charlie Hebdo won a partial victory when a French court conceded that the turban cartoon was, standing alone, offensive to Muslims, the Canadian Human Rights prosecution against Ezra Levant ended with the entire system of human rights proceedings on trial. This paper tells the story of these two cases.
A central paradox of the Internet as we know it is that there’s no privacy unless you’re there to invade someone else’s. Indeed, while living our lives online has effectively signaled the end of privacy for people as subjects, it provides a veil of anonymity for anyone who wants to use it. The Internet lets people bully, badmouth, berate, and spread misinformation without having to show their faces or sign their names. The resulting effects of the Internet on speech, privacy, and reputation are the subjects of The Offensive Internet, a new collection of essays edited by Saul Levmore, William B. Graham Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.
From the book’s introduction, written by Levmore and Nussbaum:
“The speed with which reputations can be made and altered is just one way in which the Internet has changed everything. It surely is the case that most of the changes are for the better but, sadly, the Internet is a curse when one is the subject of negative information, whether self-presented, and then indelible, or communicated by others. And yet the Internet has changed nothing, which is to say it has returned us to the world of the village.”
It’s not just civil libertarians who worry that 9/11 has been used to justify insidious state overreach; academics have a mounting set of concerns, too. A new essay collection, Academic Freedom in the Post 9/11 Era (Macmillan), whose contributors include Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Henry Giroux, makes the case that universities are in trouble. Its editors are Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing.
The book presents academe as bullied by corporate interests, saddled by the need to curb its rhetoric to match national political agendas, and pressured by the military. Its message so piqued Stanley Fish that he used its authors as characters in a short Kantian morality play on his New York Times blog, pitting them against conservative academic David Horowitz and provoking a few hundred comments.
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