Such laws vary dramatically from country to country.
In Ireland defamation is worth far more than personal injuries. (In the order of 10 times more). You really don’t want to be sued for defamation here!
@Peter, first of all, thanks for running EuroGA! I don’t post that much but am an avid reader.
However, have to say this practice you’ve described here does incur a bias. Shutting up is a message. If businesses threatening to sue EuroGA are taken off posts, and only them, information this site offers is getting skewed. If you take one out, you should ban all discussion on commercial businesses.
Everybody understands litigation would be personally too much for you, but then again what’s been said about the Swedish law is true. Same here in Finland. There’s nothing illegal publishing negative comments about a company. Much illegal bashing an individual person. Tested in courts many, many times.
As an example, the #1 newspaper here two days ago published an article about a very rotten warranty experience a private person had suffered with his Huyndai Sonata. A day after another story describing how Hyundai Motor Company just started behaving. Sorry, links are in Finnish. These are professional journalism, but the legal case is the same as with any website. There is no case.
Reasoning behind this is that an individual will always be the underdog against companies. Of course one man businesses exist, but reputation risk comes with running a business.
EDIT: Of course British law might be different.
I doubt a European enterprise which controls a server on the Moon is immune from action 
But, who wants to run a site where people can slag others off with impunity? There are plenty of forums like that already… it is desirable if you carry advertising because you get a lot more traffic.
Peter perhaps you should set up the server in Vanuatu. Including a section in the bylaws stating that all complaints should be made in person at the front desk.
Rwy20 wrote:
Not to warm anything up; but that website (along with a few similar ones, like the one where you could search for anyone’s filed tax returns, owners and history of car license plates, and a few experiences at university where they just hang up lists for everyone to see with all the grades, names and “personnummer” on them) was one of the reasons why I posted this:Well… As my posting implied, that website is very much frowned upon and there is a law change underway to stop it. Also, my university department has not posted grade lists with “personnummer” for many years.
That site is called facebook, no? 
BTW, to get a working link to a post, you need to right-click (or the device equivalent) on the post number
Airborne_Again wrote:
There is a Swedish website which has made a database of all Swedish court cases etc. where you can search for anyone’s prosecutions, convictions etc.
Not to warm anything up; but that website (along with a few similar ones, like the one where you could search for anyone’s filed tax returns, owners and history of car license plates, and a few experiences at university where they just hang up lists for everyone to see with all the grades, names and “personnummer” on them) was one of the reasons why I posted this:
I think in other countries, people don’t feel that this is normal.
Airborne_Again – unfortunately none of this is relevant because if one is legally challenged one cannot simply ignore it. That way (believing that one’s country has laws protecting one, etc) lies the road to ruin because you will always lose an uncontested action – unless it is so blatently outrageous that the court throws it out.
So one will always incur costs, into 3 digits as the entry level and that only covers some correspondence.
It’s fun to discuss the finer points of law but it is just like champagne socialism – you can practice it once your bank account is nicely filled up and your mortgage paid off. And there is a great deal of champagne socialism around.
The initial topic of this thread was that we will not be advertising businesses which threatened legal action against EuroGA. Or me – I am the obvious target, not just because I am a visible mod/admin here but because I have been an aircraft owner for 15+ years and have a history of doing “business” with a lot of firms, some of it quite unsatisfactory and thus resulting in those firms being hostile afterwards. Such is life in GA, as most aircraft owners will confirm. If you just rent, you won’t ever see any of this. Most of it doesn’t get posted, because most owners have such difficult maintenance arrangements (airport politics, based firms being barely ok, hangarage tied to maintenance, etc) that they cannot afford to p1ss off anybody at all.
It is a tricky decision to make but I believe it is the right one, on purely ethical grounds. People rely on reports on companies to be fairly reliable and if a company squashes negative (but truthful) posts with a legal threat, the whole thing gets unbalanced.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It is different if a forum is part of a newspaper or something similar, as they will have to be covered against legal costs some way or the other anyway, otherwise they can not ever be independent in their reporting. One single claim could wipe out the whole company easily, if that was not the case.
I don’t know if it is an EU rule or a purely Swedish legislation but in Sweden a web site can be registered as a newspaper. That means that a whole lot of legal protection suddenly applies. The flip side is that a named publisher is personally responsible for everything that’s written but OTOH they get the full legal protection that a proper newspaper would have. E.g. it is much more difficult to convict a newspaper for libel. This has some interesting effects. There is a Swedish website which has made a database of all Swedish court cases etc. where you can search for anyone’s prosecutions, convictions etc. Both building such a database and making it available to the public would normally be in blatant violation of the EU personal integrity laws, but because the web site is registered as a newspaper it is in fact legal. There is talk of changing the law because of this web site.
Peter is fully right here.
Today, it is completely enough that a company is threatening to sue or actually do it to close a forum. So it is nothing but diligence to take such things seriously and delete any offending post.
No, it is not nice, yes it is a restriction to free speech (which doesn’t exist anyhow) but such claims can very quickly consume tens of thousands of Euros without any chance of getting any of it ever compensated, even if you win the court case. The whole thing costs, time, money and is a huge risk.
The only remedy is to pay for an insurance for legal costs, but again, someone has to foot the bill for that.
It is different if a forum is part of a newspaper or something similar, as they will have to be covered against legal costs some way or the other anyway, otherwise they can not ever be independent in their reporting. One single claim could wipe out the whole company easily, if that was not the case.
