{"id":334511,"date":"2010-02-18T01:44:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T06:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100212\/0220478142.shtml"},"modified":"2010-02-18T01:44:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T06:44:00","slug":"uk-court-says-it-has-jurisdiction-over-racist-material-stored-on-california-server-if-content-created-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/334511","title":{"rendered":"UK Court Says It Has Jurisdiction Over Racist Material Stored On California Server… If Content Created In The UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve had numerous posts lately about jurisdiction questions raised online, and PRK<\/a> alerts us to a case in the UK where two men were convicted for publishing racist information online<\/a>. The jurisdictional question came in because the content itself was hosted on servers in California. The court said that UK law still applied because the actual action of creating the content was done by the two men in the UK, and it was then just uploaded to the server elsewhere. While there are serious concerns<\/a> over “libel tourism” type cases in the UK, in this case I can understand the reasoning behind the ruling. The actions themselves took place in the UK, so it does make sense to try the men there.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are some other issues related to the case, including the court saying it didn’t matter whether or not anyone in the UK had actually seen the content — which seems a bit odd. While the content ran afoul of some sort of hate speech laws in the UK, it does seem reasonable to ask whether or not the content itself was ever actually seen by anyone, but the court found otherwise:<\/p>\n


\n“The point that there cannot be publication without a publishee is in our judgment fundamentally misconceived,” he said. “It is based on an irrelevant comparison with the law of libel. Libel is a tort or civil wrong where it is necessary for the claimant to prove that the words complained of were published of him and were defamatory of him … the offences of displaying, distributing or publishing racially inflammatory written material do not require proof that anybody actually read or heard the material.”
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We’ve had numerous posts lately about jurisdiction questions raised online, and PRK alerts us to a case in the UK where two men were convicted for publishing racist information online. The jurisdictional question came in because the content itself was hosted on servers in California. The court said that UK law still applied because the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}