Telecommunications, Media And Technology (TMT) Law Update – Volume 32

JUDGMENTS

Online defamation principles considered by NSW Supreme Court

On 20 March 2020, a judgment of the New South Wales Court of Appeal observed a range of principles relevant to online defamation in a case involving defamatory Facebook posts: Stoltenberg v Bolton; Loder v Bolton [2020] NSWCA 45. The parties accepted the trial judge's statement of principles concerning proof of publication, including his reliance upon Dow Jones & Co Inc v Gutnick (2002) 210 CLR 575 in support of the proposition that in an action for defamation involving online material, publication is established though evidence that a third party downloaded and read the material. Specifically, Gutnick also stands for the proposition that publication is a bilateral act in which material is not made available in a comprehensible form until downloaded on to the computer of a person who has used a web browser to pull the material from the web server. The parties also accepted the trial judge's