Internet and Law: Law against Internet defamation to be adopted in Great Britain

June 12, 2012 members of the British Parliament adopted the Internet Defamation Bill in the second reading. The Bill is aimed against so called Internet-trolls: anonymous users, who distribute compromising information about people in the network.

The new Bill will oblige providers to disclose the data of users engaged in “trolling” without police order and findings of the court. Sites, where offensive and defamatory messages are placed, will be spared from lawsuits if they assist in defectors’ identification. If sites do not do this, they will bear responsibility for defamation the same way as the authors of false messages. Names, e-mails addresses and Internet-Protocol data of the “trolls” will be reported to the victim so that he/she could sue the offender.

Comments and posts, which are difficult to understand if they are a lie or not, the bill proposes to delete immediately - it should be done by the owners of the sites on which they are placed.

A decision of how to act if the defamatory message was posted from a public point of Internet access was not taken yet.

It is proposed to file a complaint on all previously posted defamatory messages, after which old messages will not be possible to complain about.