Bloggers beware when you criticize the rich and powerful - by Doreen Carvajal
The daily Web log, or blog, of the former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, vanished after Murray's British Internet provider received a flurry of ominous legal letters demanding the removal of "potentially defamatory" information about Alisher Usmanov, a mining mogul with a rising stake in the English soccer club Arsenal. Two weeks later, Murray is not blogging, but his blistering opinions are about to surface again through a Dutch Internet provider that offers refuge to controversial bloggers in the United States and in England, where libel laws are more lax. And with that journey, Murray has stirred support and a common outrage among bloggers and Internet service providers who complain that chilling demands from companies are becoming more frequent in a number of countries.
"I'm personally predicting that the next growth area is not censorship of bomb-making Web sites," said Richard Clayton, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University and part of the OpenNet Initiative that tracks Internet filtering around the world, "but complaints about defamation and civil suits."
Companies in the United States, Canada and Australia have moved against bloggers to remove copyrighted material with takedown complaints or have demanded removal of critical comments posted by blog visitors. British bloggers are particularly vulnerable to defamation complaints because of a previous court ruling that found that Internet providers qualified as publishers of libelous material if they did not react when alerted about a problem.
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