Responsabilidad por difamación a través de Internet

No es lo mismo publicar un link hacia material de contenido difamatorio que publicar el propio material. El Tribunal Supremo de la provincia canadiense de la Columbia Británica (Supreme Court of British Columbia) ha fallado, en una sentencia dictada el 27 de octubre, que la publicación en una página web de un enlace (link) hacia material de contenido difamatorio no implica ser responsable de la difamación. Existiría responsabilidad si el enlace estuviera acompañado de un texto en el que se describiera el material difamatorio.

"In the present case, although hyperlinks referred the reader to articles now claimed by the plaintiffs to be defamatory, the plaintiffs agree that the defendant did not publish any defamatory content on the p2pnet website itself. The defendant did not reproduce any of the disputed content from the linked articles on p2pnet and did not make any comment on the nature of the linked articles. In these circumstances, a reader of the p2pnet website who did not click on the hyperlinks provided would not have any knowledge of the allegedly defamatory content.
"As the Court of Appeal observed in Carter, citing the proposition of the New York cases MacFadden v. Anthony and Kline v. Biben, "reference to an article containing defamatory content without repetition of the comment itself should not be found to be a republication of such defamatory content".
"[...]hyperlinking can never make a person liable for the contents of the remote site. For example, if Mr. Newton had written "the truth about Wayne Crookes is found here" and "here" is hyperlinked to the specific defamatory words, this might lead to a different conclusion."

Nota:
-Texto íntegro de la sentencia (Crookes v. Wikimedia Foundation Inc.)
-Más información en out-law.com y en el blog Lvcentinvs.