Parliamentary joint committee publishes report on Draft Defamation Bill

                                                  Science writer wins libel appeal                Photo: englishpen 

The Joint Committee report on the Draft Defamation Bill has been published. Here's the official summary. The main points that jump out for me are:
UGC:
There are recommendations to formalise the approach to notice and take down procedures on web forums; and to make a distinction between treatment of material from comments made by clearly named/identified individuals and those posted by anonymous ones.
Substantial harm:
The committee report says individuals and corporations should demonstrate serious and substantial harm in order to bring a libel action. These terms will, of course, need to be defined. It also recommends: "corporations should be required to obtain the permission on the court before bringing a libel claim". 
Extension of privilege:
Privilege should be extended to "fair and accurate reports of academic and scientific conferences and also to peer-reviewed articles appearing in journals", says the report. This should be encouraging news for journalists at publications such as New Scientist, who I was talking to recently.
   Here's the full report, if you like that sort of thing. Handily all recommendations are highlighted in bold for ease of scanning. 
  At first glance it looks like there's plenty here for the media to be happy about. But, of course, there's still some way to go before any of these recommendations and other Draft Bill proposals become law.

An interesting week for libel law

It's a good week for anyone interested in libel law.

The Joint committee on the Draft Libel Reform bill will publish its report at midnight.

We're also expecting the Supreme Court ruling on the use of the Reynolds defence in the Flood v Times Newspapers case.

I'll be interested to see what the Draft Libel Reform Bill committee has to say on how the law should deal with user-generated content on reader forums.

It will also be useful to see whether it has any proposals to offer on whether organisations should have to demonstrate 'substantial' harm in order to be able to bring a libel case.

Well, I'm excited anyway...

Link round-up for news:rewired and forthcoming journalism events

One of the great things about all the change that's going on in journalism at the moment is that there are plenty of people getting together at conferences, seminars and informal gatherings to share thoughts and ideas on a variety of subjects.

I didn't manage to get to the latest news:rewired event 'Connected Journalism', which is a pity because it sounds like there was plenty of thought-provoking stuff. Here's where to find some interesting thoughts from the day, followed by some links to journalism talks and meetings taking place in the near future.

News:rewired
There's plenty of info at the news: rewired site, including 10 lessons from the day.

Storify is a popular tool at the moment and inevitably got some mentions on the day, so here's a couple of versions: 

• news: rewired's own Storify round-up of the event featuring some of the advice, slides, discussion and tweets from around the conference 

• and Hannah Waldram's version of the day

There's also a copy of the Storify presentation on Slideshare

John Thompson has posted some videos of speakers talking about online communities including Guardian community editor Laura Oliver and Citizenside's Philip Trippenbach

There's also some Coveritlive material from the event including this one from the final session: The future of collaboration in digital journalism

Forthcoming events
For anyone in and around London over the next few days, a few journalism-related events might be worth a look:

On Monday 10th October there's a discussion on libel reform hosted by the NUJ freelance branch. Speakers will include libel lawyer Robert Dougans,who took part in the Simon Singh case and Index on Censorship news editor Padraig Reidy.

Meanwhile, City University have two interesting lectures on consecutive evenings - and they're free to attend:

• On Tuesday 11th October Heather Brooke will speak on Civic journalism: What it is and why it matters

• The following night, Wednesday 12th October, will see former PCC chair Baroness Buscombe talking about Changing times and changing media regulation.

And data journalists should have a bit of fun at the AOP and Mozilla Hack Day on Thursday 13th October.

Some other major conferences and events are listed in journalism.co.uk's journalism events diary, while the Frontline Club stages talks and other events club that might also be worth a look.