Things that leave one cold...Defamation Karam.

Defamation reminder: Keep it clean 

Written by The Trade Me team in General at 2:00 pm, Tue 8 May

We remind all members of the importance of complying with Trade Me's terms and conditions and message board policy. These include requirements that members not post comments that are defamatory, abusive or offensive.

Trade Me apologises to Joe Karam for some members' use of the message board in breach of the terms and conditions to make comments about him personally and as a supporter of David Bain.

If anyone posts on the message board in breach of Trade Me's terms and conditions, they will have their message board privileges removed at Trade Me's discretion and without notice.

First of all it was reflecting on the 5 not guilty verdicts. A lot of people were excited by the result and expected that I would be the same but I wasn't because it's hard for me to celebrate a 'victory' from a battle that never should have taken place. David Bain should never have been charged, should never have suffered over a decade of false imprisonment and so while the verdicts were welcome I was left cold by what the man had been put through, by thinking that it had happened to others in the past and will happen to others in the future. The great victory, and even David might agree, would have been not only his deserved freedom but the system looking into to itself and making the appropriate corrections able to be observed by an independent authority with swift access to the Courts to adjudicate any decisions or omissions - much like Judicial Review.

Which brings me to the apology published on Trade Me today, it's been almost 3 years in the making but what it shows is that the common law has moved faster than statute. Whilst the Law Commission grapples with on line law breaking of any sort the common law has broken through. The apparent difference between a word written in a newspaper, on placard, in a public place is finally seen as no different to that written in cyber space. Common sense has prevailed, where the Law has reached out for new codes, common sense has shown the existing Laws fit cyber space and all that was needed was for the Courts to plug in, not to complexity but into the simple fact that language, not presentation is what makes a threat, an obscenity or that which is judged defamatory.

Clearly, Trade Me never defended their publications as not being defamatory. They simply claimed not to be responsible, however overwhelmingly naive that was being that they are the owner of the site and therefore the publisher. I'm not surprised to see they have settled, made a written apology, and apparently have banned or will ban for life the errant fools that thought that they had the right to publish what they liked. The settlement has now become a established precedent for cyber space publishers in New Zealand and probably overseas, a good step against which to measure how every person should conduct themselves in cyberspace as being no different than as if they were writing a letter to the editor of the daily which they hoped to have published.

There are some suggestions that the settlement figure is substantial, as it of course should be. But whatever the amount, the costs Trade Me would have agreed to have paid would have far outstripped the settlement figure. I asked the question yesterday, where to now for Kent Parker and the hate-siters? Today the answer has become even more obvious. I recall coldly the raucous laughter that accompanied the hate-siter's claims that 'Karam wouldn't dare sue.' The pompous obook making claims that cyber-space was like 'having a chat in the pub,' all the idiocies that one could imagine. And also the attacks against my family that attended some of those.

Kent has never been too bright, so I'll make it clear once again. TM didn't contest that the publications were not defamatory, they denied responsibility - the first was obvious the second was hopeful to the extreme and the reason on which they settled. There defence case was matchsticks and glue, albeit stronger than Parker's and Purkiss.

In the last couple of hours I have been recalling letters from TM asking for further information on what I considered was publication of defamation or hate-message on their boards, a serialised response to something they couldn't understand or didn't want to know about. Nor could they understand that if a thread was running, the theme was alive and any language signalling Joe or David didn't have to be specific - just as the Law says.

It isn't lost to me that the apology is not to David and I have said earlier that his case is the strongest, as have other commentators who consider the verdict in the retrial as a complete answer in Law to the defamatory filth that has been stacked against David. So things may not necessarily be finished there.

Van Beynan becomes more obvious on the landscape now, along with all the material passed to Parker and co. Parker by any measure is finished as he was before he even began, just like all the 'right thinking' hate-siters.

In the meantime congratulations to Joe, he's helped common sense prevail through complexity, allowed a word to be seen for what it is, whether in a letter or on a world wide computer screen.