Canada: Linking to defamatory content - Crookes v. Wikimedia
Foundation
In Crookes v.
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (B.C. Sup. Ct. Aug. 29, 2008) the Supreme Court
of British Columbia had to decide if under Canadian law linking to an
article that contains statements alleged to be defamatory, does, by itself,
constitute defamation. Liability could only exist if the link publisher made
any statement relating to the defamatory material itself, the court said:
"[32] In the
present case, although hyperlinks referred the reader to articles now
claimed by the plaintiffs to be defamatory, the plaintiffs agree that the
defendant did not publish any defamatory content on the p2pnet website
itself. The defendant did not reproduce any of the disputed content from the
linked articles on p2pnet and did not make any comment on the nature of the
linked articles. In these circumstances, a reader of the p2pnet website who
did not click on the hyperlinks provided would not have any knowledge of the
allegedly defamatory content.
...
[34] I do not
wish to be misunderstood. It is not my decision that hyperlinking can never
make a person liable for the contents of the remote site. For example, if
Mr. Newton had written "the truth about Wayne Crookes is found here" and
"here" is hyperlinked to the specific defamatory words, this might lead to a
different conclusion."
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