Section 15: On a lighter note... blow me

If anyone has been following the other controversy this week, that is, the broohaha over Ontario Premier McGuinty's Flick Off conservation program, The Star's Linwood Barclay has some suggestions for additional add campaigns.

Support the fight against Crookes!

In 2006, Wayne Crookes, a major creditor of the Green Party of Canada who significantly financed the GPC's launch into mainstream politics, sued OpenPolitics.ca for libel. Although the trial has been put off at Crookes' request, legal bills remain.

By 2007 Crookes also had sued numerous other parties, including myself, Micheal Geist, P2PNet, PBWiki (now PBWorks), Wikipedia and Google. And, yes, Crookes is the person who is trying to argue that just having a hyperlink which is in some way pointing to material he claims to be libelous counts as disseminating libel, and thus is libelous in of itself. Other arguments in his claims make political wikis and blogs next to impossible to run in Canada -- and difficult elsewhere -- due to liability issues.

Although the content complained over is no worse than what we all read everyday in the blogosphere, Canada's libel laws heavily favour the plaintiff, often leaving even innocent defendants with considerable costs to bear.

Please contact me at freepoliticalspeech AT rogers DOT com with any offers of support, financial or otherwise.