Blog Legal Debate

[sarahxxx]

I have been contacted by a girl on AW telling me to take down a post on my site about her, apparently I do not have her permission to write about her and am not allowed to do so. She claimed "I do not want myself splashed over websites."

I pointed out to her that the post was not actually made by myself, but by a member on my site and although the post could be about her the link to the AW profile was dead and not hers. It did not have any personal information or any photos of her. Apart from that the write up was a good one about the time he had spent with her and actually recomending people to visit her.

She replied with "I never gave permission, i've studied law so just remove it, im being fairly nice about this so far."

It strikes me as strange and although I am not sure about the legal implications, I am not sure she is correct in what she is saying about anybody neediing permission to write about you.

Her idea of discetion needs working on, she has adverts spread over various web sites including a facial photograph of her.

Sarah x x x

[Classy_Katy]

It's not defamatory so I don't know what the issue is...it doesn't positively identify her and it's true. If she's studied law, you could ask her to provide the reference to the case law/statute so you can understand it yourself.

[jayzee77]

Sounds like a bluff to me, most people mention law to scare people.
If there I nothing nasty, or revealing it sounds likes there's not a lot she could do, other than become nasty in other ways etc.

[HORNN]

awww shame how ignorant some people can be!!!
you can write about me anytimesarah..!!!
she doesnt know, its a way of getting new potential clients..
i have met clients thru word of mouth, who ended up becoming regulars.

[Trinity-Belle]

From my limited understanding, there are really only three grounds for her to ask you to remove the information.

1/ If it contains personal information, like her real name and address.

2/ If it is libellous - which is different to defamatory... it's okay to publish nasty stuff, so long as you can prove it's true! At the very least, if it is clearly opinion, then there must be reasonable grounds to support that opinion. To be libel it has to be both untrue and damage her reputation or standing.

3/ If it infringes her copyright... like if you have published a photo of her or a substantial part of the text from her web site or some such thing.

Otherwise, I think you can publish pretty well what ever you like!

(I might be wrong though.... it's a long time since I had to deal with this sort of stuff!)

So I think I would probably just reply politely saying that you will not be removing the content unless she can demonstrate to your satisfaction that it is either libellous, infringes her copyright, or contains personally identifiable information of the sort covered by the Data Protection Act, then you will not be removing it. After that, I would probably ignore her and not get drawn into e-mail ping-pong about it.


If it were me, then if she had asked nicely I would probably have complied, just because it would be the nice thing to do... but if she was all high and mighty about it, I would just dig my heels in.

Oh... the one thing she is right about, though... if this is your web site, as in, you own the domain, then you are responsible for all of the content... whether you personally contributed it or not. Also, strictly speaking so is the hosting company, and so is who ever owns the servers that the hosting company uses... although in practice the buck pretty much stops with you.

[sarahxxx]

I removed the post and replied with

"I have removed the post not because of any legal obligation just because I can. It is an old post and I have no real concern if it stays on my site or not, it is insignificant."

I do check all posts on my site and really saw no harm in what was written, there was no photo and no telephone number, there was a link to her profile so I did not see it as being a problem. I have always been happy to promote other escorts, in my view there will always be competition and I have no objection to that. My web site gets approx 5-600 visitors a day and some of my posts are read several thousand times over a period of time as they are indexed in google

I think the three points Trinity-Belle mentions are the basic survival guide to what you are legally aloud to post

If it were me, then if she had asked nicely I would probably have complied, just because it would be the nice thing to do... but if she was all high and mighty about it, I would just dig my heels in.

Yes part of me, 80% felt that way, but the 20% of me got the better and I removed it. I have no intention of causing others distress and so did the decent thing. I was just amused that she felt an advert on the internet was being indiscreet, yet has facial photos of herself on other web sites.

Sarah x x x

[Trinity-Belle]

I have no intention of causing others distress and so did the decent thing.

Cool

[fetishbootslut]

Sounds a bit mad to me stressing over that but it takes allsorts!.

Did best thing Sarah removing it not worth the aggro.

[sarahxxx]

Did best thing Sarah removing it not worth the aggro.

Yes that was my thought, right or wrong is a one sided point of view, if the person you upset feels that they are right there are many ways of causing trouble for people on the internet...

So always best to err on the side of caution, you never know who you are dealing with, there are some faceless lunatics out there.

Sarah x x x

[fetishbootslut]

Did best thing Sarah removing it not worth the aggro.

Yes that was my thought, right or wrong is a one sided point of view, if the person you upset feels that they are right there are many ways of causing trouble for people on the internet...

So always best to err on the side of caution, you never know who you are dealing with, there are some faceless lunatics out there.

Sarah x x x

yes too true Sarah.