Gotta love it when I type too fast to even come close to proper spelling… sigh
Hi, Eats_Crayons
Well, you learn something new every day. It seems that falsity is a necessary element of defamation in the United States and (presumably) some other countries; it is not in Ireland (where I live), England, Scotland, Australia and (presumably) some other countries (but truth is a defence in these countries).
Don’t know about Belgium, I’m afraid.
I’m actually in Canada and the quality of “falsehood” is required here too.
Necessary if you think about it. Otherwise any convicted criminal could sue for libel if any newspaper ever reported their conviction. “That newspaper told the world I’m a murderer! And it’s just ruined my reputation!”
The UK has more strict libel laws that are more plaintiff-friendly. In the UK, I would have to prove that you do boink sheep, whereas in the U.S., you would have to prove that you don’t and that I lied. The differences can probably be attributed to the way U.S. laws have to balance the “freedom of speech” in their equation.
There are also interesting legal stuff for “opinions”. So I could insult you and say “in my opinion, you look like a sheep-boinker!” and my “opinion” would be weighed differently than if I claimed that it was a “fact.”
I’m in Canada, and I’ve noticed that our laws seem to straddle the fence between American and UK models. Some laws are practically identical to those in the UK, others are indistinguishable from those in the U.S.
Well, yes, but the statment that the criminal had been convicted would be true, so the defence of justification would suceed. The criminal would have to plead that there was an innuendo that he had been rightly convicted and, even then, it would still be a defence for the newspaper to show that he was in fact a murderer (which they could do by calling the evidence that was called in the original criminal trial).
[Hijack]Curiously enough, there was a case in the UK in the 1960s where a convicted robber, Alfred Hinds, who had always protested his innocence and had attracted attracted some media attention for doing so, sued a retired police officer who published a memoir detailing (inter alia) his involvement in the case, and saying that Hinds had been “rightly convicted” of robbery. That Hinds had been convicted was indisputable; that he had been rightly convicted was a matter of debate.
Hinds sued, and was able to call evidence which demolished the original prosecution case. He won his libel action, and was subsequently given a free pardon for his original conviction. English law was subsequently changed by statute so that, in any defamation action in which the plaintiff has been defamed by accusing him of a crime, the defence of justification is automatically made out by showing that he has been convicted of that crime.[/Hijack]
John Lennon ripped into fellow Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney in How Do You Sleep. I have never heard that it was ever challenged in court.
I don’t see anything defamatory in the lyrics - just artistic criticism.
UDS–in the U.S., that defense for libel is called “fair comment”, and is used so that an artist can’t sue someone for giving their work a bad review. I’m not sure if that would apply in this case.
when rappers dis each other in lyrics, it makes me laugh. they are so pathetic!
I think it would. Lennon is giving McCartney a bad review for artistic integrity. He’s doing it in lyrics but, as we said at the beginning, there’s no magic about lyrics.
IANAL but I think expressions of opinion are protected in the US. I’m pretty sure you can say that so and so is a stupid jerk - if you’re willing to risk a smack in the nose.
However, if you state something as a fact, it had better be a verifiable fact. For example if instead of saying he is a stupid jerk you say that he only scored 75 on the Stanford-Binet I suspect you better have iron-clad evidence for that.