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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday May 23 2002 13.30 BST
There are several things to bear in mind about the Friends Reunited case - in which retired teacher Jim Murray successfully obtained £1,250 in damages from his ex-pupil Jonathan Spencer for making defamatory comments about him.
Primarily, it is not new - a person who has been libelled will always be able to sue the maker of the offending statement, regardless of the medium used.
So if Mr Spencer felt the inclination to hang a large poster on his front gate making the same comments about his former teacher, it is unlikely the result would have been any different.
More importantly, it does not appear that Mr Murray attempted to sue the Friends Reunited website: it is reported that the offending material was removed after Mr Murray contacted the operators of the website claiming that they were hosting defamatory statements referring to him.
By acting swiftly Friends Reunited operators would have been able to argue in court that they had taken "reasonable care" in respect of a publication, and therefore availed themselves of a statutory defence under Section 1 of the Defamation Act 1996.
This legislation sought to rectify the problem of liability for so-called "innocent disseminators". It introduced the Section 1 defence for the benefit of those who are not authors, editors or publishers in the traditional sense. In the case of a press libel, this could include retailers and printers of the offending newspaper.
In the first defamation action involving the internet to reach court in the UK, Dr Laurence Godfrey v Demon Internet, such a defence was not open to Demon because the managing director did not react to a fax notifying him that offending material had been posted on one of the ISP's websites. In fact, the material was only removed after a further 10 days.
In failing to remove the material, Demon was said not to have taken reasonable care in relation to the publication and could not successfully rely on a further requirement of the Section 1 defence, namely that it had no reason to believe that what it was doing caused or contributed to a defamatory statement.
The Demon case was settled with Dr Godfrey receiving a payout of £15,000 and an apology. Demon Internet changed its procedures. The legal costs, which Demon had to pay, were said to run to £480,000.
Individuals posting on the Friends Reunited website (so called "members"), and even those who visit the website, are deemed to have accepted the disclaimer clauses.
Most sites will also contain a provision that the website host does not filter or monitor the messages posted on it, a disclaimer designed to distance the host from any implication that it exercises editorial control over the website.
This is absolutely crucial since, in the eyes of the law, the more steps which a website host takes to avoid publishing defamatory material, the more it may risk being unable to argue that it does not control the content of its website, thereby depriving itself of any protection under the Defamation Act.
In the Friends Reunited case, Mr Spencer revealed his identity on the website, since its rationale is to bring together old classmates. He, like many others posting on the numerous websites used on a daily basis, probably never imagined that he would be traced and sued in connection with a statement he made, albeit in a public forum.
After all if Mr Spencer's real purpose was to make malicious comments about his former teachers, he could have chosen to post on Friends Reunited under an assumed name.
Legally however, pseudonyms don't offer security from libel either.
Last year two financial websites, Motley Fool and Interactive Investor Limited, were ordered to disclose details of an anonymous contributor - who went by the name of Zeddust - who was said to have carried out a "concerted campaign of defamation" against Totalise plc.
On the particular facts, the judge found that Totalise had a very strong case - it was agreed that the offending material was clearly defamatory of Totalise and its directors - and that there was no way that Totalise could pursue its case without being able to identify the individuals posting the material, which it clearly could not do without the assistance of the website's operators.
This does of course still leave open the possibility that a message may be posted in such a way as to obscure its origins - either through clever computer buffs, or by giving false personal details to website hosts.
In these instances, they may be virtually untraceable, and in some circumstances, website hosts may find themselves in court asked to assist with the identification of contributors' internet protocol (IP) addresses.
There have been cases where it has been possible for third parties to gain sufficient technical information to trace the sender of an anonymous email by contacting the ISP.
In any event there will be cases where an IP address alone will probably be insufficient to enable an angry claimant to identify the maker of the defamatory statement without the assistance of police resources normally reserved for criminal cases. In the case of Friends Reunited, however, such elaborate steps were unnecessary.
