The Wardman Wire

Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads is looking at putting some time into campaiging for reform of the UK Libel Laws.

Following through on the Usmanov Affair

Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads may be taking on Libel Law Reform as his next project. He has a post there asking whether it is more important to work on the reform of British Libel Law, or alternatively to set up a project to track Rupert Murdoch’s Media Empire. Tim writes:

After the Alisher Usmanov affair, I did some poking around to see what kind of support bloggers and other web-publishers could expect from the UK hosting industry we would most likely have to abandon en masse if this kind of thing continues… and I didn’t get a nibble.

There were some fine print and television journalists batting for us here and there during the whole Usmanov thing, but challenging the status quo on something this big requires hefty editorial support. I don’t like our chances.

The short version is as follows: if bloggers want to change or challenge the UK libel laws, those of us that do choose to stand together against this kind of nonsense will on our own.

Of those two options, I would go for the Libel Law Reform. After all, if some reforms are achieved, then there is a smaller chance of being sued by Mr Murdoch later!

Also, there is a still a fairly strong coalition of support from bloggers across (and outside) the political spectrum, and I think that is a thing worth maintaining.

For me, this also ties into the whole Civil Liberties agenda - which I think is crucially important in the next 1-5 years.

Wrapping Up

I’m providing one focus for Civil Liberties material in the “Campaigns” channel on the Magazine View of the Wardman Wire . I’m also including relevant article summaries from the Our Kingdom blog.

If you publish articles in this area from time to time - and can provide a clean feed of them - I’d be interesting in including a short excerpt (linking directly back to your site) in this feed.

Tags: libel law, bloggerheads, alisher usmanov, shillings lawyers