free speech is dying!

From Andrew Bolt:

"Our laws against free speech really are shameful:


HOTCOPPER is Australia’s largest stockmarket chat room. Its managing director, Greg D’Arcy, told us this week he was getting ready to move to another country, probably the US, due to the relentless pressure from lawyers.

‘’There is no freedom of speech in Australia,’’ said D’Arcy. ..

HotCopper has 170,000 members. On average, it receives 6000 blog posts a day. It has 10 volunteer moderators catching 50 defamatory posts a day.

And it cops, on average, two legal threats a week…

The worst thing, he reckons, is that companies are using their shareholders’ money to shut down debate.

In the case of Empire Oil & Gas, where he was forced to remove the entire history, 60,000 posts, the company is raising money from its shareholders at the same time as threatening to sue them for defamation...

On August 17, the West Australian Supreme Court made orders that HotCopper release the IP addresses and locations of those who had put up posts on the Empire Oil & Gas discussion thread. Effectively, HotCopper was compelled to release the identities of 53 of its members, including an 85-year-old grandmother."

A letter arrived from Perth lawyer Martin Bennett a few days later demanding all posts be removed from the EGO thread. HotCopper duly removed the entire discussion… Two defamation writs were also issued: one to shareholder Darren Watson, the other to a 67-year-old nurse from Queensland, Susanne Devereux.