-50themselves the next day – not in response to a specific complaint by the
appellants’ solicitors – and taken down immediately. But, in practice, as the
courts below found, such control cannot be exercised across the board because
of the huge volume of traffic generated by the forum. The respondents, unlike
the editors of newspapers, cannot possibly know the content of the statements
they publish; nor can they be equated with the operators of a television station
such as the defendants in Thompson v Australian Capital Television PTY
Limited [1996] 186 CLR 574 where the station owners chose to re-broadcast a
live interview and had the means of control over the contents before they were
broadcast: As Fok JA remarked at §104, it would have been relatively straight
forward in Thompson to delay the transmission by a few minutes to determine
whether any part of the material should be expurgated. On the facts of a case
like the present, manual screening of the content was impossible and no
technology has yet been invented to filter out defamatory statements by
mechanical means. As Fok JA observed at §105, filtering by keywords was not
possible since defamatory meaning could be communicated by a combination of
words, which may individually be innocuous.
125.
No reported case in the common law world has been found to fit the
circumstances of this case. Godfrey v Demon Internet Ltd [2001] QB 201
comes fairly close. There the service provided by the defendant, called a
“bulletin board”, was described by Morland J (at p.204G) as a “one-to-many
publication from author to readers round the world”, available to those with
access to a service called Usenet. A defamatory message was posted on the
bulletin board; the plaintiff alerted the defendant to the existence of the
offending posting; the posting was not removed; subscribers were able to read
the offending message until it was automatically erased 10 days after the
posting. The plaintiff claimed damages for libel in respect of the period when
the message remained on the bulletin board after the defendant became aware of
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