The Observer blog jumped for joy - or perhaps just shifted joyfully in its chair - when it read in this morning's Guardian that Lord Phillips threw out a libel claim against the Wall Street Journal website on the grounds that no one actually read the disputed item.
OK, it's a bit more complicated than that. The Judge - oh, wise and noble judge! - found that an online publisher cannot be sued in an English court just because the page is technically visible in the UK.
The previous legal precedent was a case in Australia in which Dow Jones (US company, also WSJ) got nailed in an Australian court because a disputed article was accessible in Oz. I believe, and hope that someone will correct me if I'm wrong, that it was claimed that a page impression is equivalent to publication. If you post a bad thing on a website you may therefore have published in a foreign jurisdiction and are subject to foreign libel laws. Which would open the way for libel law shopping in the toughest jurisdiction - available as long as there is an internet cafe round the corner.
The new UK judgement - oh, wise and noble judgement! - makes the point that the page has to have been viewed a "substantial" number of times for it to have constituted a libel in Britain. As it was, only five people clicked on the WSJ link in question and three of them were closely associated with the plaintiff.
We hope that the ruling itself will soon appear here.
