It often takes adversity to create a change to the law. The killing of Sarah Payne brought about Sarah’s Law, a law to curb and control paedophiles by allowing parents to do sex offender checks, for example.
Ian Puddick outside the Court
Now, our basic rights of freedom of expression online could be defined by an incident between a millionaire businessman, his personal assistant, and her husband. Making the front page of the Metro today, as most Twitter/Online legal stories do, is the case of Ian Puddick. A man, who after his wife committed adultery posted rants and sordid details of the affair online. He even went as far as creating websites and fake handles across LinkedIn.
Puddick’s Law could become a defining moment in internet legal history. If he is found guilty of harassment, it could potentially change the way we are allowed to represent ourselves or talk about others online. If this happens, it has a lasting effect for many facets of social media and social culture. This potentially goes beyond the Ryan Giggs story and further into public culture.
What Puddick’s Law could do is create the following:
• Guidelines about online behaviour by individuals
• Restrictions to the anonymity of user IDs and profiles
• Strong legislation over the misrepresentation of other individuals online
• An internet code of conduct
Although Puddick’s trial is about harrasment, his actions have been seen as somewhat justified by many of the internet public. So what the court’s need to decide is not whether it was harrasment but whether it was simply a step too far.
The interesting thing is there are similiarities between a case that I was made aware of via Quora (Link here) which was raised to me by Howard Fredrics:
This legal issue already has a precedent, and the matter has been well established and decided by a District Judge — not merely a panel of Magistrates. I’m therefore extremely surprised that the police and CPS brought such a case forward against Mr Puddick. In the scantily reported case of R v Fredrics (2009-10), DJ Kreiman, sitting at the Kingston Magistrates Court on the matter of charges of harassment (s.2 of the Protection from Harassment Act, just as in the case of Ian Puddick) via the setting up and publication of a website that contained documentary evidence and satirical musical/video works, ruled that “Harassment laws were not intended to protect individual reputations.” DJ Kreiman also found that the content of the site was in the public interest. The defendant, Dr Howard Fredrics was found, therefore, to have “no case to answer” and the matter was closed.For further information, please see the link:http://www.sirpeterscott.com/ima… is, furthermore, curious indeed that this matter was not picked up by the major press organisations, thereby suggesting to me the possibility that they may have received legal threats from the alleged victim’s employer.
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Howard Fredrics
