Defamation And The Internet: Additional Guidance But No Certainty

In Barrick Gold Corporation v. Lopehandia (2004), 71 O.R. 3d 416 (Ont. C.A.), Justice Blair endorsed the view that the Internet is "potentially a medium of virtually limitless international defamation". In the past year, Canadian courts were frequently occupied with maintaining the balance between free speech and the protection of reputations online. Five recent cases involving defamation and the Internet are of particular note:

First, in Crookes v. Newton, 2011 SCC 47, Justice Abella writing for a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada, found that posting hyperlinks to defamatory material does not expose the person posting the link to liability for defamation. The Court found that hyperlinks are references and, by themselves, are not "publications" of the content to which they refer. Only when a hyperlinker presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that actually repeats the defamatory content should that content be considered to be "published" by