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By Paul Biba

Richard Curtis has a fascinating article in his E-Reads blog about how easy it is to obtain a libel judgement in England, and how this ends up stifling the publication of many books. Take a look:

logo.gif… What’s it all about? “Unlike in the United States, where plaintiffs have to prove that the defendant’s statement is willfully false and defamatory,” writes Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal Europe, “the burden of proof is reversed in Britain. According to U.K. libel laws, the plaintiff has to show only that the statement harms his reputation — which is the case with almost any accusation, true or false. It is the defendant who must then prove that his allegations were not libelous.”

Because of this radical difference between the British (guilty until proven innocent) and American (innocent until proven guilty) approaches to libel, American authors and publishers and their lawyers have deliberately withheld UK publication rights to many books that might give offense to rich and/or powerful persons or entities that might bring a lawsuit in a British court. If you have any doubts that this is a sword hanging over the neck of every author and journalist, some examples will erase them. You can find them in Tripathi’s article or this one in the New York Times, Britain, a destination for “libel tourism” by Doreen Carvajal. …

 
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