Wednesday 20 March 2013

Bloggers' Rights and anti-SLAPP


One usually thinks of a librarian as a calm and lawsuit-free job. However, a librarian in Canada is facing a $3.5-million lawsuit over a personal blog post he wrote three years ago. Dale Askey, an associate librarian at McMaster University, is being sued by Edwin Mellen Press Ltd., an international academic publishing company, who filed two lawsuits last June.
Mellen Press alleges that Askey accused them of “accepting second class authors” and urging “university libraries not to buy (their) titles because they are of poor quality and poor scholarship.” While this lawsuit will be heard in Canadian court under Canadian law, bloggers have been threatened with lawsuits in the US for articles they’ve written and opinions they’ve expressed. This brings up a whole slew of First Amendment issues and the SLAPP statute. 
If this lawsuit were filed in the United States, it might be considered a “SLAPP” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit. SLAPP refers to a lawsuit or legal threat intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. Typically SLAPP lawsuits target ordinary citizens who cannot afford to pay the hefty legal fees it takes to defend such a lawsuit. They are a method used to intimate others from participating in debate and free speech and can be a strong method of silencing critics. SLAPP lawsuits often come in the form of a lawsuit claiming defamation or libel. The defining characteristic of a SLAPP lawsuit is that the plaintiff usually loses the case. However, a typical SLAPP lawsuit does not get to the trial phase as it is method used to chill the speech of citizens.
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