Risks of criticizing people online Okay, so, basically, I want to make a blog about ripping on people. And it's not like just ripping because ripping but I really want to point out flaws in works/people/attitudes/technology/decisions and whatever. I don't really care about people commenting "oh, you're moron, you're so and so, go kill yourself" What I do care about is this: If I say company X is full of morons who have no idea what they are doing is there any legal ground for them to come after me? Like I said, I could not care less about people insulting me, I only care about legal troubles/lawsuits and hairy stuff like that. Is there any reason for me to worry about that?
There are two common defenses to defamation (there are others): That what you said is true. That what you said cannot be reasonably interpreted as a factual claim. If after examining the totality of the circumstances, a fact-finder (judge or jury) sees your statement to be an expression of opinion rather than a factual claim about the subject, you would not be found to have defamed the subject. The opinion defence doesn't have a bright line rule. In your example, I think it is clearly on the side of opinion. However, if you were to say something like "Douglas Dunce, Apple's Chief Engineer, has an IQ of 76", that would be almost certainly be deemed a factual claim. The leading case here is Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co. The court held that "statements that cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual are protected". Other summaries of this defence: http://www.defamationlawblog.com/2009/01/fact-vs-opinion-setting-the-record-straight/ http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news-media-law/news-media-and-law-summer-2011/opinion-defense-remains-str
Like many other jurisdictions, in the UK sites like the Daily Mail are liable for the content they host. In other words, the legal issue here is they either do not have the staff available to (or simply do not want to) spend the time moderating the comment sections in order to remove potentially defamatory or otherwise illegal content. As Lag added in a comment below: another legal reason may be liability for publishing something that creates a substantial risk of seriously impeding or prejudicing the course of justice in some ongoing legal proceeding. Far easier to prevent it beforehand than moderate it (and risk missing it) later. Content on Twitter (for example, replies to their own tweets), on the other hand, is not the Daily Mail's problem to moderate.
A statement cannot be libel unless it actually identifies the plaintiff to defame him. The identification need not be by name, but it must be specific enough that the public would be able to determine who the statement referred to. You can read more about this concept at Prof. Eugene Volokh on Libel Law Therefore, if nobody other than the plaintiff or defendant learned about the connection before the filing of the case or the publication of discovered emails, the original work of fiction was not a libel. And by telling everyone that the connection existed, yes, the plaintiff was impliedly consenting to any further alleged libel and it would be a defense from liability for the plaintiff. Furthermore, there wouldn't be libel unless whatever the fictional character did was untrue (something the real plaintiff didn't do) and the public would think that whatever the character did was actually an assertion that the real plaintiff did it. I could write a satire about a President Brock O'Bama who is actually a lizardman in disguise, and that's my First Amendment right, not a slander of the President. Disclaimer: only describing the common law and majority rules. State laws may differ.
The notification that you saw is not useful legal information for you: stuff always belongs to whoever owns the stuff. It might be interpreted as saying "it doesn't belong to us", but you can't count on that (it's virtually guaranteed that at least some of the content there is owned by the website owner). A more informative statement would be "You will have to get permission from the content owner to copy their stuff", and "We're not going to spend time figuring out who owns what". You could read the terms of service (try this with Stack Exchange) to see what the site tells people. The TOS here says that if you contribute anything, it "is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license". You can then look up what that license says and learn what that allows. Websites are kind of tricky, though, because it's not hard to change the wording of a TOS, and you need to know what specific TOS was promulgated at the time a particular contribution was unleashed. Usual practice is to think it through carefully and not frequently tweak the TOS, but it's not illegal to change the TOS. Note that copyright law does not prohibit you from using other people's stuff, it prohibits you from copying. The distinction is clearer when you see a post that explains an algorithm with actual code, you read and learn and make use of that, but write your own code. As a user out there, if there isn't a clear indication that stuff posted is there for the taking, under some public license (as is the case with SE), then getting specific permission to copy, from the owner of the content (possibly untraceable), would be necessary. Now assume that you're a moderator or site-owner of some forum: presumably (hopefully) you have a TOS that addresses that situation, which says that moderators have the right to edit or delete content at their sole discretion, and also you say what kinds of posts are prohibited. Such an statement is not absolutely mandatory for all things, but it may be necessary to avoid litigation over some acts. One one end of the spectrum, it would be illegal for a forum to host child porn, stolen credit card numbers, or protected digital content. If a user were to post such stuff, the site would need to eliminate that stuff, and the poster could not legally rely on an argument of the type "That's my stuff, you have no right to mess with it". On the other hand, if a forum actually requires paid membership, then there may be a strong contractual expectation that the user is getting something of value, so you would have to watch for statements that could be interpreted as broad permission to put stuff out there without any interference. (For instance, a file-hosting service would have only minimal restrictions on content, aimed at protecting their own legal interests; whereas a political-advocacy site would have maximal interest in prohibiting the expression of views counter to the cause). Thus the SE TOS has you "grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works", which allows moderators to correct typos, delete offensive wording, and obliterate entire posts. If a site fails to have any such clauses in their TOS, then it might be a matter that has to be settled in court, whether they have the right to eliminate "spam" (i.e. advertising for a service, especially if the reason for getting an account was to provide an advertising platform). In light of the limited use sanctioned by the TOS, per the below comment, legal copying will be quite limited. However, "fair use" a situation where copying is allowed, regardless of what the TOS may say. (You could be banned from the site, but you could not be sued for infringement). Fair use was invented precisely so that people could make comments like "Jones advocates an absurd law, saying '...[quote from Jones]...'". Thus you can comment on a post and quote the relevant part ("The lines '[... quoting the code ...]' results in an infinite loop"). See the Fair Use FAQ for more details.
You can report it to the publisher(s) Protection of copyright is a matter for the individual rights holder: some (I’m looking at you Disney) are vigilant, thorough and draconian in protecting their rights, others don’t care at all. Unless you are the rights holder it’s none of your business. In much the same way that the guy charging your neighbour for 4 hours gardening but being long gone in 2 isn’t. If you like your neighbour or feel duty bound to do something, you tell them and then leave it to them what they do with it. This is not a matter for the authorities as it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal copyright infringement. Just like the gardener above, this isn’t a crime.
I think this is a lot like this question Liability for poisoning food one expects to be stolen because you are causing harm to someone/something when they are using your things without permission. That question says that if you expect someone to do something with something that you have purposely made wrong then you are legally responsible for the effects.
There have been cases in the UK where paying someone's legal bills was interpreted as joining their case. So when A with no money libels someone, and B with deep pockets pays A's lawyer, then B risks being held liable for damages if A gets convicted. So B should be very careful. Just giving you money is probably the safest. But attorney-client privilege is between attorney and client. I have been laid off twice with my company asking me to take an employment lawyer and paying for it. (Interestingly each time the bill was exactly the maximum amount the company was willing to pay :-) It would have been absurd if my company could demand information that is under attorney-client privilege just because they paid the bill. Why did two companies pay the lawyers bill? Because that way they ensure that the separation is without problems. The lawyer explained the settlement contract and what it meant exactly. They also checked that the contract didn’t contain anything unacceptable which the company would have fixed. So if I had tried to sue them later I would have no chance to win (but there was no reason to sue). Another reason not to sue was that the company offered I settlement that was very significantly more than was legally required, but if you sued them you would only get what you got in court - most likely less than you would get without suing. So basically they paid to make sure I would have no reason to sue them later.
Hacking into a computer owned by someone else and accessing the data stored on it without permission is a misdemeanor according to StGB 202a (de|en). But only if it's successful. So a failed attempt isn't a misdemeanor yet. When you notice that someone might have committed a criminal offence (regardless of whether you are a victim or just a witness), then the usual procedure is to report it to the police. If they consider the crime serious enough to investigate, then they will request the identity from the ISP. But the copyright lawsuits which are filed in bulk by law firms working with media companies are not crime reports. They are civil lawsuits. A civil lawsuit is when someone had a tangible damage because of something someone else did, and now they want money in compensation. When there is no damage, then there is nothing to sue for. So when you want a judge to file an injunction to force an ISP to give them the identity of one of their users, then you would first have to explain to them how much financial damage you had because of that person and that this is enough damage to make it worth everyone's time. That might be quite challenging for nothing but a failed SSH login attempt. But it might be possible if a single person made so many login attempts that it incurred you non-negligible bandwidth cost or even caused a denial-of-service.