The lesson that the law of defamation applies equally to electronic communications as it does to any other type was learned the hard way by Norwich Union when it was forced to pay £450,000 to a rival and make a public apology following a careless e-mail circulated by an employee on its internal computer system in July 1997.
The fact that legal liability for a libellous e-mail will generally attach not only to the author but also to their employer is now well established, and many companies have implemented internal procedures and employee education programmes in an attempt to prevent libellous material being circulated.
A very recent development however, is that in March this year, the High Court ruled in a landmark decision that an Internet Service Provider ("ISP") "publishes" (for defamation purposes) and is responsible for defamatory material posted on its sites.
