Times fights legal threat to online archives

The Times has been back in the Court of Appeal challenging a legal ruling that will have major implications for all online news services.

The case centres on Russian businessman Grigori Loutchansky, who earlier this year successfully sued the paper after claiming it portrayed him as the head of a criminal organisation. He then sued again for libel over the same articles, which were kept in the paper's online archive.

Mr Justice Gray, the trial judge, struck out The Times's plea that internet publication was protected by the paper's duty to keep the archive as a service, and the public's interest in accessing it. He decided that there could not be a duty to maintain an archive of stories irrespective of their truth.

British publishers with online archives could face the indefinite threat of libel action if the paper's appeal fails.

The Times says in its written submission to the Court of Appeal: "The proposition is a simple one, namely that the public has a legitimate interest in, and a right to know about, the contents of newspaper back numbers, and that the defendant, as the web site proprietor, has for that reason a social or moral interest, or is under a social or moral duty to provide that material for the benefit of the public. If that proposition is wrong, an internet archive proprietor, or the librarian of a great library, would be obliged to prevent general access to, or to delete, any material that he did not believe to be true. That would be to airbrush history in a manner worthy of Stalin's Soviet Union."

In a further twist, the paper is also appealing against Mr Justice Gray's groundbreaking decision that he alone - not a jury - should assess how much compensation Mr Loutchansky should receive. The Times is requesting its "constitutional right" for a jury to decide the libel damages.

It was Mr Justice Gray who ruled against The Times in the libel action, although a jury had delivered verdicts overwhelmingly backing the newspaper's account of its investigation.

After the judgment in favour of Loutchansky this spring, the Russian asked the judge to apply a legal device contained in the Defamation Act 1996 allowing judges to dispose of cases summarily, without a jury.

Using this procedure, special remedies are available to libel claimants. Judges can award no more than £10,000 damages. But, uniquely, they can officially declare an article to be false and order the newspaper to publish an apology or, if it refuses, a summary of the court's judgment.

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