After some to-ing and fro-ing in the Houses of Parliament, the law of defamation will finally be revised when the Defamation Act 2013 comes into force later this year.
Novelties include:
- the criterion that, to be defamatory, a statement must now cause or be likely to cause "serious harm" to the claimant's reputation. For businesses, this means "serious financial loss";
- a defence if a statement is "substantially true". This replaces the common law defence of justification;
- a defence if a statement was (i) a statement of opinion (ii) which indicated the basis of that opinion and (iii) that an honest person could have held at that time on the basis of any fact. This replaces the previous defence of fair comment;
- a defence if a statement was on a matter of public interest and the defendant reasonably believed that publishing the statement was in the public's interest. This replaces the common law "Reynolds defence";
- a defence for an operator of a website if it did not post the statement on the website. But this defence is lost if (i) the claimant was unable to identify the actual author of the statement, (ii) the operator had notice of the complaint about the statement and (iii) the operator failed to respond properly to the complaint;
- a claimant is restricted to bringing a claim within one year of the date on which the defendant's statement is first published. This is called the single publication rule and replaces the previous multiple publication rule (when for example every hit on a website gave rise to a claim);
- an action can only be brought against a secondary publisher where it is not reasonably practicable to bring it against the author, editor or publisher;
- the court can order an operator of a website to remove a statement, and prohibit any person from distributing, selling or exhibiting the statement.
Click here for further information regarding the Act.
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