The first casualty of the Conservative bloggers lawsuit has claimed an unlikely victim. The SaskBlogs Aggregator, run by Lance Levsen, has been taken offline due apparently to the likely threat of a lawsuit. The Aggregator contains Small Dead Animals as a member, and thus has stored posts claimed as libelous, even though they only LINK to an alleged libelous statement.
"Likely threat of a lawsuit"? As opposed to an actual threat? I suspect that the names in yesterday's statement of claim are all the names there will be, but if Lance is really worried, it isn't as though R. Warman's email is that hard to find.
However, it is more fun, I suppose, to nail oneself to the cross and harvest sympathy from passer's by.
Incidentally, the passage in the statement of claim that Lance (and others) seem to be worried about concerns Kate MacMillan letting SDA guest blogger K. Shaidle link to the original FreeD post re. Senator Cools (something I've done at least once, incidentally). I think the first part of paragraph 28, which most people seem to be ignoring, is the important one:
Ms. McMillan permitted the defendant Shaidle to access SDA and post the Cools posting along with the allegation that Mr. Warman was responsible for it...
This does not seem at all analogous to the Wayne Crookes case at all, as far as I can tell. Here the offending material appeared on SDA, plus there was a link back to the source, plus there was a claim on SDA that Warman had written said material.
With Crookes, a blog-roll linked to a site that linked to a site.
As for Lance, well, Bloggers die more often opera stars and for the same reason...bad acting! I imagine he'll be back in a week or two.
