This story is some background for the benefit of those in the BloggerCon IRC channel:
Defender of Canada thumbs his nose at British court's libel finding
David Akin
Financial Post
408 words
3 March 1999
National Post
National
C04
English
(c) 1999 National Post . All Rights Reserved.
A British court has ordered a British Columbia man to pay (ps)15,000 ($36,260 Cdn) for libelling an English physicist in an Internet discussion forum. Legal experts believe it to be just the second time a court has awarded damages in an Internet libel case. But experts also say physicist Laurence Godfrey may have trouble enforcing the judgment against Michael Dolenga, who lives in Victoria. In 1995, Mr. Dolenga was a graduate student in biochemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when the libel occurred. Mr. Godfrey had made some comments that impugned Canada and Canadians, to which Mr. Dolenga responded by calling Mr. Godfrey names. “Read his comments about Canada – a boring place, Canadians have no merit, no talent whatsoever, no Canadians of note, stuff like that,” Mr. Dolenga said in an interview. “In some of my postings I would defend Canada very articulately . . . and some of it was name-calling.
Go read any newsgroup and you'll see the childish insults that are flung back and forth and that's all it was; just some juvenile name-calling.” But Mr. Godfrey, who has filed several libel lawsuits in British courts against defendants such as The Toronto Star and the University of Minnesota, believed Mr. Dolenga's comments caused harm to his reputation. Mr. Dolenga did not defend the lawsuit and, as a result, the British court entered a default judgment against him. On Friday, the court ordered Mr. Dolenga to pay Mr. Godfrey (ps)15,000 in aggravated damages, plus (ps)1,250 in legal costs. “I'm not disappointed by the judgment,” Mr. Godfrey said yesterday. “It's a substantial award. It sets some kind of scale.” Mr. Godfrey has another libel lawsuit pending against Demon Internet, England's largest dial-up Internet service provider. He said he intends to have a Canadian court enforce the judgment, but Canadian legal experts say such a request would not be automatically enforced, particularly in a situation where no defence of the suit was made. Mr. Dolenga could not be reached for comment this week but in an interview last week said: “I don't have an address [in Britain] and I don't any property in Britain. Basically, my stance is I'm not recognizing the British court's jurisdiction and the hell with it.”