RE: The Economist and e-Archiving

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> 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
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rickand@unr.edu