Another judge who has richly earned the death penalty.
This stifling of free speech, by both state and corporate interests, is a trend spreadingl like wildfire in the Western world.
Indeed, it is more and more the case that I see opinions in officials and members of the public that would be comically stupid, if they did not infringe so far on the rights of others. There are many reasons for this, mostly rooted in the controlled media, education as well, to choose any old example, the use in schools of the word "wrong" to mean "illegal" restricts the vocabulary of children in such a way as to encourage the synonymity of the two words, eg. If the govt. says it`s wrong it is wrong, regardless of the ethical arguments. Even seemingly intelligent adults fail to make the distinction between legality/illegality and right/wrong. I may be ranting here, but whenever I get into discussion about this I am reminded of the stubborn behaviour of many acquaintances of mine, even some fairly intelligent family members who, given the chance, would restrict the speech of others to what was deemed "appropriate", this in turn leaves me ranting and frustrated because I cannot get away with putting these people up against a wall and taking the appropriate action with a .45, which, I can assure you, would relieve a great deal of stress.
Libel, slander, defamation, damage, incitement, sedition, and obscenity cases are squelching free speech. Publishers are held liable for the words of others, and even distributors are held liable.
Indeed, Libel is merely an official way of recovering losses incurred due to the stupidity of the general public, if I publish a defamatory and unpleasant story about Tim in a newsgroup, he can sue me because of the damage done to his reputation, of course, only stupid members of the public believe unfounded and referenceless (is that a real word???? ;-)) defamatory stories about others, and the more people that believe a story, the higher the compensation required, hence, it can be shown that the relative size of libel case settlements is inversely proportional to the average IQ of the general public ;-)....
(Hey, if the Paladin case withstands Supreme Court scrutiny and his upheld, look for the Cypherpunks list node distributors to face criminal charges.)
Looks like it`s about time I set up majordomo on my other acct and started running a node, lets see what UK law has to say. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"