Alison
as I don't have a direct acquaintance with the statute book of the State of
Victoria I can't make any judgement about whether Australian libel laws are
as bad as the American lawyer makes out but your initial post under this
heading seemed to imply that they are, as well as the remarks about 'truth
is no defence'.
I don't want to dwell on my own status on this list, it falls into two areas
of debate, I think: I offer this hesitantly, one is whether I infringed the
in-house rules of PEtc, on that opinion seems to differ, and I must add that
I am quite willing to make a public apology, the other though that has been
introduced is the wider matter of Internet censorship, which is rather more
important an issue than DB's status on a poetry list.
It's very difficult to encompass all the tangles involved: commonsense says
that if an established UK poet decided to sue a list-member under Australian
state law they would, whatever the legal outcome, succeed in making
themselves a laughing-stock, can you imagine what periodicals like the
Guardian would make of it? This I project as a hypothetical scenario, just
to clarify the murk a little.
There's much more: one is the nature of e-mail - I've talked about this
before - e-mail is ambiguous in that it is simultaneously very 'verbal' in
tone yet still a matter of print. So it falls into grey areas. Likewise it
seems remarkably able to transmit 'mood', I've noticed many times just how
personal rows on lists can become, I'd say too that almost everyone who
posts regularly is capable of putting their foot in it, I certainly don't
subscribe to any doctrine of Bircumshavian Infallibility, I've often found
myself feeling disagreement with my own posts!
Anyhow, I do feel this isn't just a matter of a 'boring wrangle'
All the Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 7:33 AM
Subject: Re: List matters
My last post was a little flippant. Yes, these are serious issues,
and there's not much we can do about Zimbabwe (although the Victorian
laws aren't as bad as the American lawyer made out). Fair comment
doesn't exist in a merely academic sense and certainly doesn't
require proof that we're all academics... But for our purposes, and
for the meantime, the list rules are fairly reasonable guidelines.
They're also there to guarantee interesting conversation rather than
boring wrangles.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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