From IMMI

On the 9th of March, 2009, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued a ruling against the Times of London which has generated great uncertainty for European publishers. The Court confirmed that, for the purposes of the law of libel, an Internet publication should be considered to be ‘published’ afresh every time a reader views it. The ruling also found that libel proceedings brought against a publisher after a significant lapse of time may well, in the absence of exceptional circumstances, give rise to a disproportionate interference with press freedom…’. The court left open to member states what, if any, limiting period may be applied to archives.

The view that an electronic archive is 'published' every time it is viewed has been extensively abused to remove important articles on corruption from online newspaper archives long after they were published. For example, The Guardian, inorder to avoid unending legal costs, removed several such articles in 2008, originally published in 2003, which reported, the conviction for corruption of a billionaire involved in the Elf-Acquitaine scandal.

To protect the historical archive and give certainty to publishers, we propose that, following the model used in France, that lawsuits related to publishing must be filed within two months of publication and that a ceiling for damages be set to 10,000 Euro (France: three months, 15,000).

Statistical behavior

In order to achieve the goal of history protection, we must first understand how it is being attacked. IMMI has proposed to build a database of European libel suits that can be used to extract statistical samples and inform decisionmaking.