> Well, in the case of online libel, there's been a fairly high-profile case brought up due to the Friends Reunited website (www.friendsreunited.co.uk) - it's one of those sites where you can find old schoolmates you lost touch with. Apparently this guy was dredging up the old playground rumours about teachers sleeping with people etc. and the teacher he named came right back and sued him for libel. He won.
>
> People *can* be libelled over the net. However, if you ask me, there should be seperate libel laws for things put online, because they are far easier to remove and retract than, say, a headline on the front page of the News of the World. You can't exactly change the front page of a national newspaper a week after it's been on the stands.

Neither can you instantly save the front page of the national newspaper and send it to ten friends, four of whom will copy it to their hard drives and leave it there until the next owner of their computer finds it two years from now; two more friends each copy it to six of *their* friends; one posts it on a forum where it remains for several years, being read and perpetuated by hundreds of thousands of people; the other three friends show it to people in their office who start it going around the world as a spam email.

It is far easier to retract something that appears in a print newspaper than anything you put on the internet. Once you put something on the internet, you can retract it if you like, but you have to assume that once it's been there long enough for even one person to see, it's going to be out there forever. And there isn't any way on earth you can remove it. Removing the original only takes care of one copy among potentially millions.