Libel laws are irrelevent to most people in the UK. Yes anyone can be libelled, but you have to be insanely rich to either bring an action for libel or to get one of these super injunctions.
Oddly, I was listening to the Spectator podcast this morning (donāt judge me!) and Matthew Parris was saying that in light of the response (or lack thereof) to the John Whittingdale āscandalā that he thought that people generally didnāt care about who had sex with who so much any more.
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[quote=ācubby, post:6, topic:76652, full:trueā]
However, having your private life be tabloid fodder is the price of celebrity. [/quote]
Iām not comfortable with that philosophy, and I donāt think you should be either. To borrow from the articleās example, Bill Clinton is a celebrity, but so is Monica Lewinsky by association. Divine Brown might be called a celebrity by association with Hugh Grant. What about those who associate with Divine Brown? And those that associate with them? There has to be a rolloff or cutoff somewhere.
But in some sense, there isnāt. Celebrity is bestowed by other people, how many other people depending entirely on the size of the gossip pool. For example, Jessie Slater became an āinternet celebrityā when 4chan raked her over the coals. Sometimes celebrity just happens. You can then invoke soft concepts like degrees of celebrity or circles of relevance, but nothing strong enough that Iād want to base a system of rights on it.
There are a few paths to celebrity (politics) where we probably should get some insight into a personās private character. There are others where you canāt practically expect the sort of comfortable public anonymity most of us enjoy. But saying thereās no way for a sufficiently famous person to construct some private corner of society for herself is just crazy. I believe that we must be able to talk about pretty much anyone, if only to protect speech for those relatively rare public good cases. But we also need to recognize that puts some responsibility on us to use our judgment and only jump on things that actually matter.
In other words, if the public good is to be served by free speech, the public needs to grow up and stop buying every dead tree with āSEXā written on it.
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The Elton Effect: the Streisand Effect but with jurisdictional arbitrage
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Iāll be the pedant; the injunction here is not āsuperā, as English / Welsh press can talk about it, but not who it relates to. If it were a super-injunction, they wouldnāt legally be able to disclose its existence.
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This stuff, and things like warrant canaries in the US, reminds me more than I care to dwell on of the verbal gymnastics people need to use to talk on the internet in China.
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Uhm, you are only speaking about the plaintiff side. The fact that nobody in the UK is even allowed to talk about the fact that an injunction exists shows that this very much does affect average people in the UK. Hell, ask Simon Singh if libel laws affect people.
I get annoyed by these stories, because people pretend to complain, but really theyāre just entrenching this kind of restriction of speech by treating it as a funny silly game to try and make themselves seem clever and important.
If Popbitch (and other media collectively) were actually opposed to courts restricting speech, they would just name Elton John & David Furnish, and anyone else who tried to have them gagged, as a matter of course. The UK is not so illiberal that the state would be seen to spend all its time prosecuting news organs for reporting the truth; these injunctions persist because they never have to be enforced. Our world-beatingly foul, craven media wonāt challenge the status quo, because theyād rather have something to pompously declaim about than, you know, serve the truth.
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Unfortunately, you also need to be insanely rich to defend a libel case, which does affect most people. Some directly, some indirectly:
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Yeah, @cubby kind of told us that when he used a āBritish singer and his husband.ā
But Iāll give you a like for not dancing around and just putting it out there. 
What was interesting was a lot of English papers would go on to say that a Scottish newspaper had named [Elton John] as the person in question, but then went on to say that they couldnāt name the newspaper.
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Wait, Elton John is gay?
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Of course not, you Funny Girl !!
Perhaps Iām just a spiteful First Amendment Absolutist; but Iād be inclined to view anything you purchased a hefty dose of prior restraint on as being presumptively worthy of broad publication; unless presented with rather compelling reasons to the contrary.
If you just left the matter alone, Iād be inclined to respect your privacy unless presented with rather compelling reasons to the contrary.
Itās sort of like flag-burning and blasphemy that way. Usually not worth the effort, and often a bit tactless; but if itās actually forbidden; thatās reason enough to do it as hard as you can possibly get away with.
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I thought a super injunction was an injunction where nobody is allowed to even reveal that it exists.
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It is; Coryās using the wrong term.
Obviously, and in any case an anonymous person is posting about another anonymous person. The point I was trying to make is that in the absence of libel laws you can make untrue statements about identified persons that cause them actual damage. Iām not sure if this is a different sides of the Atlantic thing or whether you are deliberately misunderstanding the point Iām trying to make, but I could extend your argument to say that the Internet facilitates fraud and blackmail, so we should stop bothering to enforce laws against fraud and blackmail.
You havenāt explained why a law intended to protect people who criticise the government has been extended to make it possible for the media to wage campaigns of falsehood against individuals.
It isnāt UK; itās Irish and the guy who runs it is virulently anti-English. The clue is in the name.
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Thatās the wrinkle, this is a civil case, so as long as the people who the injunction is about* want to keep paying Carter Ruck to keep suing people, they can, nothing to do with the state.
(* I live in the UK, so I assume I canāt name the people already named in this thread, thanks law!)
