This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

As my GigaOM colleague Bobbie Johnson pointed out in a recent post, the French government has been making some strong — and controversial — statements about what it wants the company to do after an outbreak of homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments erupted on Twitter. The minister for women’s rights, Najat Belkacem-Vallaud, wrote in a newspaper opinion piece that the government believes the service must “respect the values of the Republic” and take action to stop or censor hate speech. She said French authorities will be discussing how to do this with Twitter, and added (translation by Google):

“Even before the work is started, it should already be possible to act to remove tweets that are clearly illegal and, at the very least, make access impossible, so that the damage already done [to homosexuals, etc.] do not persist or do not cause additional problems with young people attracted by the publicity given to this unfortunate story.”

Many governments want to use Twitter to control speech

Since French laws make hate speech illegal (as similar laws do in a number of other countries, including Canada), the minister is really just asking Twitter to do the same thing the German government did: that is, to censor speech that contravenes the laws of the country. In the case of Germany, it was tweets by a neo-Nazi group, since expressing Nazi ideologies is illegal there. Twitter explained at the time that it had no choice but to obey the laws of the countries it does business in, but that it would try to limit the impact on free speech by only blocking access to those tweets for residents of Germany — as permitted by the regional-censorship tools it announced about a year ago.

Although they haven’t gone as far as France or Germany, officials in Britain have also broached the idea of trying to restrict Twitter speech — and for what they say are similarly virtuous purposes: after the riots in London last year, the government argued that much of the violence was driven by social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry instant messaging. The authorities held discussions with most of the major players about how (or whether) they should regulate such conduct, but in the end no action was taken. Twitter has also been involved in some of that country’s infamous “super-injunction” cases, where even the mention of an injunction is considered illegal.

In some ways, the German example was the most clear-cut case Twitter could possibly have wanted: it referred to specific speech — expressing Nazi ideology — that is illegal, and is relatively easy to nail down. But this ability opens a vast can of worms for a company whose CEO and general counsel have both repeatedly referred to it as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

In Turkey, for example, it’s illegal to say or do anything that is seen as insulting to Turkishness — a law that the government has used to block YouTube videos, among other things. What if Turkey was to ask Twitter to block or ban tweets or accounts that engaged in anti-Turkish behavior? A similar kind of question came up during the recent hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, when both sides used Twitter to hurl threats at each other. What if Israel asked Twitter to ban or block Hamas accounts or tweets sympathetic to this illegal organization? What if Egypt had asked for censorship during the Arab Spring?

What qualifies as hate speech on Twitter?

The racist and homophobic tweets targeted by the French government are an even slipperier slope: even if hate speech is against the law, what 140-character messages would fall into that category? Would simply using a hashtag like #SiMonFilsEstGay (If my son was gay) or #UnBonJuif (A good Jew) qualify? If Twitter was supposed to be removing or blocking access to specific tweets, how would it determine which were genuinely hate speech? Would it have a list of banned words, or run some kind of sentiment algorithm filter on the entire stream?

In a very real sense, what the French government seems to want Twitter to do — or wants to help it do — is virtually impossible. Twitter sees almost half a billion tweets every day, and has difficulty even providing a search function that works over a longer period than about a week. How could it (or anyone else) manage to filter through those millions of tweets to remove or block access to ones that expressed specific thoughts or opinions? And even if it could, would that be the right thing to do? Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian makes a persuasive argument that it would not, although others have argued that France should renounce the “free-speech fetish” of the U.S.

As it becomes an increasingly global media entity, however — and one that controls its own platform, unlike the declining media giants of the past — this is an issue Twitter is going to have to confront head on. And how it handles these kinds of censorship demands will say a lot about how much trust we can have in this digital free-speech machine.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Shutterstock/Jirsak

Under the proposals, which were published on Tuesday, Ofcom says British ISPs would have to send warning letters to those individuals pinpointed by music, film and TV companies as potential illegal downloaders. Anyone receiving three letters in a 12-month period would then have their personal data, downloading and filesharing history handed over to the copyright owners to help them prepare a legal case.

The rules are largely the same as those previously published by Ofcom in 2010, with some minor alterations. The law will apply to any ISP with more than 400,000 customers, and copyright owners must file their complaints within one month of gathering evidence of illegal activity. Those accused will get 20 days to appeal against the complaint, at a cost of £20 ($31) — which is refunded if the appeal is successful.

Despite the fact that the draft code is being published today, and is expected to be passed into law later this year, the system will not be implemented until March 1, 2014.

It’s already been a long slog for proponents of the law and its opponents. The prospect of a three strikes policy in the U.K. has been hanging over the internet industry for several years, and formed one of the most controversial elements of the Digital Economy Act in 2010.

Since then British internet providers had attempted — and failed — to get the three strikes rules quashed, largely on the grounds of expense. But the move looked inevitable following a court ruling in March.

They have won some concessions, however: under the draft code, rightsholders will meet up to 75 percent of the cost of action, but they will still have to collect and retain significant amounts of data on users.

Gavel photograph: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock

This comes less than a month after Lovefilm signed up Universal, also on a multi-year basis. Similar deals were already in place with Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and others, and now Lovefilm’s customers can look forward to streaming the likes of X-Men: First Class from March next year, while Netflix’s can’t. The TV part of the deal (which is not exclusive) kicks in earlier, with Buffy and more becoming available next month.

“It feels great to announce another major studio deal for Lovefilm,” managing director Jim Buckle said. “Twentieth Century Fox is one of the world’s leading studios, known across the globe for creating fantastic, iconic content. This partnership will give Lovefilm members access to the studio’s huge range of recent movies and the opportunity to revisit some of the best American TV series produced in recent years.”

When Buckle talks about recent movies, he does not of course mean really recent. That’s because BSkyB — in which News Corp is a controlling shareholder — has paid for so-called ‘first window’ rights with all the major studios.

The Competition Commission, Britain’s regulator, finally decided in May that this arrangement was not anticompetitive, partly because Netflix had just joined Lovefilm as a supposed rival to BSkyB. Also, the commission reasoned, consumers don’t really care about getting very recent movies as much as they want a comprehensive offering.

Which is why the deals Lovefilm is striking these days are all for the ‘second window’ – effectively one rung above terrestrial broadcast when it comes to urgency. The films that can be streamed over the service from March 2013 will have been on the big screen in the UK during 2011. It’s the kind of complexity that makes content consumption even more confusing for the average Joe, but Fox is happy:

“We are delighted to be partnered with Lovefilm on this new window for Fox films in the UK,” Fox EVP Gina Brogi said. “This film and series agreement enables us to give UK fans yet another avenue to enjoy the great stories and characters they have come to know and love from our studio.”

If the antitrust regulators are right, Lovefilm’s customers will be delighted with the breadth of the service’s catalog, if not its freshness. It may not be enough to tempt people away from getting their recent-cinema fix from the — cough cough — darker corners of the internet, but it certainly makes Amazon’s service even more attractive than Netflix than it already was.

Netflix said last week that it would try to outbid BSkyB for those tasty first-window rights over the next year. If it fails, it said, it will ask the Competition Commission to reconsider whether BSkyB’s deals are so fair after all.

Of course, that’s if Netflix is still around in the U.K. in a year’s time. Its movie range there is pretty skinny, while Lovefilm’s just fattened up yet again. Maybe Britain wasn’t such a great springboard for the European expansion after all.

Update: Clarification added to make it clear that even though Netflix does not have early rights on 20th Century Fox movies, it does have access to TV content. We have also corrected News Corp’s relationship with BSkyB to make clear that News Corp holds a 39.1% controlling share in the company.

But when the company announced on Wednesday that it was ditching its hardware business to focus on licensing its technology, it marked the end of a troubled decade in which it tried, and tried — and ultimately failed — to reach its ambitious goals.

Of course, the news was presented with an attempt at positive spin: chief executive Indro Mukerjee referred to the move as a revamp, suggesting that there were actually much bigger opportunities in selling the technology on to other businesses.

But he’s not fooling anybody: this strategic about-face might make sense for the business as it stands today, but it has finally killed off the company’s long-burning desire to revolutionize the consumer market. In fact, it’s such a strategic turnaround that, as of today, Plastic Logic has even stripped its once-expansive website down to a single page.

So what went wrong?

The inside story has yet to be told, but there are plenty of clear moments where the company’s dream fell apart — and lessons for anyone else wanting to take on a similar size challenge.

Timing is everything

Probably Plastic Logic’s biggest — and most obvious — mistake was in its inability to execute fast enough. The technology was there, sure, but the company struggled to turn it into any sort of viable product in time. It opened its first factory fabrication plant in 2003, but still had no product by the time Amazon’s Kindle first emerged at the end of 2007.

Still, perhaps executives at the Cambridge firm thought that a rising tide lifts all ships, and that they’d be able to capitalize on any success that Amazon had with the e-reader market. And by the time they announced the Que reader at the start of January 2010, it looked they might be able to deliver a superior product: it had a touchscreen, for starters.

But the Que’s moment in the sun was short lived. Just three weeks later, at an event in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad — and with it effectively blew Plastic Logic out of the water.

All that time that the company had spent building a product, and yet it had ignored what turned out to be its biggest threat: a screen that was not necessarily a better e-reader, but that sidestepped the entire proposition by being a vastly more powerful device.

It’s hard to fight momentum

Apple, of course, has been an unstoppable rise for the past decade. Amazon too. But it wasn’t just that they were big, powerful companies. They already had functioning ecosystems that their new devices could plug into — something that the Que had put to one side in its attempt to produce hardware.

That meant that while the Kindle and iPad offered a wealth of content at a click, Plastic Logic was left pitching its reader at business people: “Read your own documents with it,” went the pitch. “Save yourself from carrying around all those hefty bits of paperwork!”. But while a busy executive might not baulk at the cost of $800, surely they too realized that there was more value in a device that could also tap into a rich library of content.

And with potential content partners — like (say) News Corp or Hearst or Barnes & Noble — busy building their own rivals to Kindle, the future looked bleak for Que. In the end the device never even made it into stores, killed just eight months after it was unveiled, without shipping a single unit.

Pivot too many times and you’ll fall over

Pivots get talked about a lot these days, but although they can sometimes work — when Fab.com turned itself from a social network for gay men into a high-end design shop, for example — they have to be built on solid foundations.

When Plastic Logic was faced with disaster, the company tried to turn itself around again by ditching the consumer and business markets and focusing on another area where it thought it could get traction: education.

So it took a huge $700 million investment from Russian fund RUSNANO and started moving the heart of its operations eastwards in an attempt to find buyers. It worked hard to build a much cheaper version of the Que (the Plastic Logic 100) that it could sell into Russian schools.

Except Russian schools, it seemed, weren’t that interested either: in reality the company was still trying to sell the same product, just to a different audience — so it still had all the same problems as in the past, and was another couple of years down the line.

Now, unable to execute on that strategy and forced to pivot again, Plastic Logic may have run out of lives. At the very least, it’s going to have to face more turmoil before it can hope to come out the other side, with jobs lost in the U.S., U.K, Germany and Russia.

These are all lessons that the company has learned the hardest way. But it’s worth remembering, whoever you are: no matter how great your technology — and make no bones about it, Plastic Logic does have a remarkable breakthrough technology there — it has to be available at the right time and at the right price.

You’ve got to compete with your rivals in totality — across markets, across users, and not just on technical specs — and all the money in the world can’t save you if you can’t execute.

Clarification: A Plastic Logic spokeswoman got in touch to say that the was not a commercial factory, but a mini-fabrication plant (here’s an archived version of the opening announcement). It was another five years before the company’s first commercial manufacturing began in Dresden, Germany.

According to a report in The Times, the U.K. government is planning to a review of current rules to consider whether explicit content could be better screened from children — and is pushing the possibility that households will have to opt in with their ISP if they don’t want all adult content to be blocked:

Cameron will reveal that the Government is to consult on whether adults wanting to view porn should be forced to “opt in” in order to access porn sites, a measure fiercely resisted by some internet service providers (ISP) and anti-censorship campaigners.

The decision to explore the option of blocking porn by default came after a Downing Street breakfast meeting with creative-industry figures yesterday. “We will consult on a default option,” a Whitehall source said. “Nothing is ruled in or out at the moment. We will look at all the options.”

Next on his list for a meeting are internet service providers, who are likely to voice concerns about the prospect of a mandatory block.

The question of network-level blocking of adult content (primarily pornography) is a perennial topic of debate in censorious, prudish Britain. The argument is that children can too easily find their way to explicit content on the web, and in order to save clueless parents the default position should be that controls are put in place.

It’s a subject that has come up regularly over the past few years, including a push in 2010 soon after Cameron took office. In fact, last year Britain’s four biggest internet providers signed a voluntary code that meant they would offer customers the chance to put a block on adult content. But it is applied in a variety of ways, and only applies to new subscribers: not enough, apparently, to quell the outcry.

Protecting children online is always a hot topic — only yesterday we reported about European-level plans to look at age verification on the web — but there is a bigger political context here worth remembering.

Cameron has endured a troubled time recently: he’s being hammered over a problematic budget, with spreading anger that his government’s austerity measures seems to hurt ordinary people but protect those with high incomes.

That led to a backlash on Thursday in local elections, with his Conservative party losing control of a large chunk of the cities and authorities it had previously commanded. Plus, of course, there’s the ongoing question of the relationship between Downing Street and the Murdoch empire, with inquiries into the actions of News Corp’s British newspaper businesses turning the heat up on Cameron thanks to his close links to the mogul.

At the same time, Cameron’s political rivals have made hay from his close connections to Google, claiming that his relationship to the search giant is one reason he has been lenient on internet porn (despite the fact, as we’ve shown, he’s not.)

No doubt emboldened by the recent court ruling that forces British ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, the Conservative right see an easy win with heartland voters by targeting adult-only content. Although it never quite tackles the technical problem of identifying explicit content, it’s clearly seen as a valuable rhetorical tool.

It’s clear where the support for this move comes from: now it will be interesting to see how much resistance it gathers, and from where.