Much of it seems to have its origins in a certain style of anonymous posting, which certainly led to troubles over at Catallaxy until - once again - Tim Blair outed the relevant party.

The SSH crowd seemed to share the common Australian hatred of people who were nerdy and geeky - I saw the attack job they did on one teenage blogger (Sam?), purely because of his ‘enthusiasms’.

Grods and Ms Fits, by contrast, go after people they consider uneducated, and mock them in a fairly standard ‘culture wars’ sense - ie ‘you shouldn’t comment, you wouldn’t know’.

Very unpleasant all round.

LE & I have discussed doing the ‘mother of all blogging legals’ posts at various times, but we haven’t got round to it as yet. Maybe now’s a good time. Anyway, off the library for me

I’d assume that in law, no! Is that right?

SL, the story is fairly clear if you read Lefty’s recent Blogging Farewell post and the Lulz Starts Here site - I’ll post links when the boys aren’t breathing down my neck for the computer session I promised

But it is an interesting example of karma - the biters bit! If it is wrong conduct in the first place, is it justified to do the same to TSSH as they did to others?

The thing that interests me is the legal disclaimer on TSSH’s former site (as saved on Pandora). It reads:

This site is intended for entertainment purposes. The views expressed here are written as satire or parody or are otherwise written as fair comment, a right afforded to the author(s) under freedom of speech legislation. The editors of this site purport that those who are the subject of commentary within these pages are those in the public eye, and as such are able to be held up to scrutiny as a matter of public interest.

People in the public eye aside, any similarity to any person living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Query how much of a legal right to freedom of speech we have in Australia to begin with - thus I’m wondering what they mean by “freedom of speech legislation”!

Cases like Theophanous v Herald & Weekly Times Ltd and Stephens v West Australian Newspapers Ltd did puport to imply a right of freedom of political free speech into the Constitution, but I understand the scope of this was reconsidered in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That being said, public law is not my strong point - I’m really a private lawyer…what I don’t know about freedom of speech laws could fill a very large book.

I’ll see how I go. I have to write a conference paper over the next three weeks, and mark exams! In fact, I’m supposed to be writing the conference paper right now - better get back to it - procrastinating as usual…

Have you got links for all of it, Helen? I understand their old site is at Pandora (NLA), but there must be more online records of what went on. I didn’t have much knowledge of the SSH back story, although I did choose one of Skeletor’s pieces for BBP06 (I think).