Reinhardt Buys (legal opinion): safe to publish url that Patricia de Lille withheld
Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Richard Catto 5,577 views
An online legal expert, Reinhardt Buys, has echoed, in an article linked below, my original assessment of Patricia de Lille’s injunction against publishing the url of the blog she claims contains slanderous attacks against Simon Grindrod, Barry Ronge, and other South African notables.
De Lille threw up a legal smokescreen. She unanimously declared the offending blog to be slander and then used the threat of legal repercussions to intimidate people into thinking twice about publishing the url themselves.
De Lille erred when she attempted to bully the South African Blogosphere and the mainstream Media into keeping her "dirty little secret".
Buys also pointed out that slander is a civil matter, and therefore neither the police nor the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) will get involved investigating her claims.
So why did de Lille react this way?
The short answer is that she most likely does not have good advisers to tell her the best way to handle online slander effectively.
If she wanted to discover the person’s identity, she needed to hire a private investigation agency to handle this discreetly. At this point, though, the person has no doubt gone to ground and may never log into that blog again.
It seems that de Lille has learned from this self-inflicted debacle and has affirmed that she is firmly in the corner of Free Speech. She just doesn’t want to be slandered online by anonymous bloggers.
Fair enough. No-one does.
Source:
De Lille’s blogging bark without legal bite
Earlier today, de Lille backed off from her "regulate the bloggers" stance and stated that she has always been a champion of Free Speech
De Lille – ‘I am a living example of fighting for freedom of speech’
Linking to the SA Male Prostitute blog could land you in court
Filed under Barry Ronge, Blogosphere, blogs, Independent Democrats, Patricia de Lille, Politics, Simon Grindrod | 5 Comments »
