Kevin McArthur has posted a message on the home of neutrality.ca and kevin-mcarthur.com:
Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.
Some are claiming that the telcos shut down the sites. That is some kind of charge. I’d like to see some kind of substantiation or corroboration for that accusation. Can we hear which telco forced the shutdown and how exactly they did that?
On a possibly related note, Michael Geist writes this week about concerns that lawsuits may be putting internet free speech at risk. There is surely a balance to be found, enabling democratized expression of diverse viewpoints while recognizing the need to be accountable for inaccurate or defamatory statements that get broadcast across this medium.
My lawyer friends tell me there is a legal principle in libel law called ‘innocent dissemination’. It applies, for example, to bookstores that don’t know a work contains defamatory material and aren’t negligent in not knowing. The principle says the bookstore is immune until they: a) know; b) are negligent in not knowing; or, c) are put on notice.
It seems to me that our freedom of speech is not without bounds. The question of what constitutes illegal content on the internet and how we should deal with such material will be subjects of a panel discussion on June 11 at The 2007 Canadian Telecom Summit.
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