Re: t.s. Eliot question & public domain

Quoth Pat Sloane <patsloane[_at_]aol.com>:
>
> Look, I'm not an attorney, nor am I English. But check the newspaper
> coverage. It said that in England the burden of proof in a defamation
> case lies with the defendant, and truth is not necessarily a defense.

Yabbut... that was journalists. And I infer from context it was Americans, with their (present company excepted) notoriously hazy grasp of quite where the Rest of the World is located...

IANAL, but I be one of Her Majesty's Subjects and a journalist with a necessarily keen interest in this area, and it seems to me that the analysis by Tim Arnold-Moore <tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au> was correct:

On 7/28/2000, Tim Arnold-Moore <tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>
> No it doesn't. The burden of proof lies with the plaintiff. Note
> there are some differences in burden, for instance truth is a defence
> in England (i.e. the burden switches to the defendant), not an absence
> of truth a positive element of the libel as I think it is in the US.
 

Jurisprudence is weird and wonderful, including a case where damages for defamation were granted even though the plaintiff had been convicted of the acts in question in a criminal court.

It would be fair *comment on the UK legal system* to say that the defamation laws are oppressive and that they shift the burden of proof *toward* the defendant. But that's quite different from what's asserted above.

--
Mike Holderness
http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/
<mch[_at_]cix.compulink.co.uk>