RE: The Economist and e-Archiving

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Wiping out the record of my saying unspeaklable things about someone or
something destroys the full history of that action. A history that might
be judged differently in the future (read Galileo??) What IF Galileo's
works could have been destroyed, erased, wiped out by a single action-the
government and church would certainly have done it. ANd if contemporary
laws-even foreign laws, permit even mandate the same thing-shouldn't we be
looking at restraining that power?

Victors usually-rewrite history and try to wipe out the history of the
losers. It is a fact the article was in the Economist.. In the electronic
version it no longer exists--how does that protect anything or anyone?

I thought Rick made the point previously though of course I have been
known to mis-read things-that courts determine what "can" be published. In
some times and some places that has been very true-it's called prior
restraint and actually has been attempted various times in US history.

If foreign courts can rule on what is legal from other countries presses (
AND enforce take down orders in those other countries)  that creates a
serious impediment to publishers world-wide and could very well result in
some pretty massive self-censorship, i.e. why take a chance if we might be
sued. The old lawyer standby... Chuck


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Anderson [mailto:rickand@unr.edu]
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 10:57 AM
To: Hamaker, Chuck; liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu;
John.E.Cox@btinternet.com
Subject: RE: The Economist and e-Archiving

> Publishing isn't pre-determined legal or illegal except in very narrow
> areas in the US

True, but irrelevant.  No one's publication was "pre-determined" to be
illegal in the case we're discussing.  Emmott published an article, he was
sued for defamation, the courts agreed that the publication was
defamatory, so he had to stop publishing it.  I would suggest that
"leaving it in the online archive" is pretty much the same thing as
"continuing to publish." To argue that Emmott should have responded to the
court's decision by continuing to publish the article that he had just
been fined for publishing strikes me as kind of silly.

Now, as to the question of whether a French court can tell a British
publisher what to do: that's a separate issue, one that I'm obviously not
qualified to say much about.  To the degree that the French court's ruling
has legal force, I can't see how any other course of action was available
to Emmott.

-------------
Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu