"On 17th March, Mishcon de Reya, one of the biggest firms of media lawyers in the UK, wrote to Outcast, and the company that prints our magazine, and the company that hosts our Web site, stating that if we ever published anything defamatory, they would sue us. They were representing one of our rivals, the Pink Paper. We thought, 'fine,' because we didn't intend to publish anything defamatory. Outcast is a controversial magazine but we know how far we can go, and we'd never deliberately print anything untrue.

Slashdot: What happened, Chris?

Shortly after that, the first publicized victim of this policy emerged, a controversial magazine named Outcast. The owner of the site was interviewed by Slashdot:

The reason is that under current UK legislation, ISPs become responsible for the content of sites they host once they receive complaints about it. ... The implication is that for an ISP, having received a complaint about a site it is hosting, by far the safest and easiest course of action is to pull the plug.

...

"If this chap said he was going to sue, we would probably advise him to get a letter from his solicitor. If the solicitor wrote to us, then we would take it down. We've got our own lawyers, and they would always advise that if there was any doubt, we should take it down.

Demon was right on. In Britain, one must prove that one's statement was not libelous if one is challenged in court, which is really quite difficult, as proving a negative is very difficult. Thus, ISPs are forced to take the policy of "Anything in doubt must be censored (removed)." Certainly the ISPs (who are probably annoyed at this as much as we are) are not playing games, as the Gagging the Internet in Three Easy Steps article shows.

Demon had previously said the case would affect the entire ethos of free speech on the internet.

Laurence Godfrey will be paid £15,000 plus legal costs - which could top £200,000 - by Demon Internet after allegedly defamatory postings about him appeared in newsgroups.

England: The Godfrey libel case which Demon settled has set a precedent: Online services in Britain are responsible for what they carry. From the article of March 30th, 2000: