-20the club’s notice board was an act of trespass. A person who defaces an occupier’s walls with graffiti prima facie does not do so with the approval or encouragement of the occupier. What this line of cases addresses are the conditions which must be satisfied before the occupier can be regarded as having turned himself into a publisher of the libel. That occurs only if the plaintiff shows that the occupier became aware of the libellous statement on his premises and allowed it to remain in place in circumstances which justify the inference that he has adopted or ratified its publication. If the occupier was not aware or if the inference cannot properly be drawn, he does not make himself a publisher of the trespassing inscription and is not liable at all. These rules are therefore not about relieving a person’s prima facie liability as a publisher but about whether or not an occupier is constituted a publisher. Since it is about establishing the occupier’s liability as a publisher (and not about a publisher establishing a defence), the onus rests on the plaintiff. 49. It follows from the distinctions drawn above that I do not share the approach in some of the reported cases involving libel in an internet context where the Byrne v Deane principles appear to have been treated merely as a facet of the innocent dissemination defence or the defence under section 1 of the Defamation Act 1996, in the United Kingdom.44 G. 50. The Byrne v Deane principles inapplicable Once the nature of the Byrne v Deane principles is grasped, it becomes clear that they do not apply to internet platform providers like the respondents. The provider of a discussion forum is in a wholly different position from that of the occupier of premises who is not in the business of publishing or facilitating publication at all, but who has had imposed on him the defamatory act of a trespasser. 44 Godfrey v Demon Internet Ltd [2001] QB 201 at 208; Davison v Habeeb and others [2011] EWHC 3031 at §34; Tamiz v Google Inc [2013] EMLR 14 at §26-36.

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