HE SHOOTS, HE SCORES! MAX GROSS PONDERS THE POWER OF A DOLLAR
On the absolutely understandable and thoroughly justifiable High Court win of munificent Melbourne gold tycoon, that generous, genial and all round good bloke Mr Josef Getnicked, the humble management (such as it is) and even more humble staff (such as it is) of Xenox News wish to extend their warmest, most heartfelt congratulations.
Given the High Court ruling, Golden Joe- one of the nicest millionaires you could possibly ever meet in this dense, dry, burning land of ours - may now sue for unlimited damages over a totally scurrilous - scurrilous I say! - report that appeared on a Yank website claiming that Mr Getnicked was involved in a tax scam with convicted fraudster Nachos Goldbug.
The Court rejected a bid by the international news service Barrels to have a libel action being pursued against it by the magnanimous mining magnate heard in the United Empire of America.
Under the ruling, material on the Internet's Misinformation Superhighway and Information Backroad is deemed to have been published in the place it is downloaded, not the country of origin. Web publisher Dour Bones is now oddly nervous about defamation laws in every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. As it should be, the scurrilous bastards! Scurrilous I say!
Getnicked was featured in Unholy Gains, a 7000-word analysis of his business interests and behaviour, which appeared in Barrels magazine and its online subscription-only service. The scurrilous article was most unflattering, with a sub-heading reading "When stock promoters cross paths with religious charities, investors had better be on guard". Scurrilous, I say!
Not that many Australians read it - just 1700 of the 550,000 subscribers live in Monstralia.
Still, Mr Getnicked was justifiably outraged - justifiably, I say! He flipped his yarmulke at the suggestion that he was the biggest customer of Nachos Goldbug, the self-styled Melbourne entrepreneur jailed for seven years for money-laundering and massive tax evasion. Hence, the court case.
However, the notion that anyone who publishes "defamatory material" on the Internet is answerable before the courts of any nation, does present a few technological, legal and practical problems. The High Court decision will have global implications for publishing and for the laws of defamation. The fallout is yet to be felt!
Still, it seems to me that unless you are defaming somebody from Newfoundland, then you don't risk being sued in Newfoundland. Then there's the question of pursuing damages. Many countries don't recognise the judgments of foreign courts, and so enforcing an order against an Internet user in another country may be problematic. Yank courts, for example, have previously shown they don't automatically accept the defamation rulings of Australian courts. But I'm sure the justifiably fuming, extremely wealthy, extremely influential Mr Getnicked will fix that! Justifiably, I say!
And on that note, Xenox News would like to state - unequivocally and without reservation or alteration - that Mr Getnicked has never EVER done anything illegal, immoral or unethical in his noble, hard-working and illustrious life (Just ask the Essendon Football Club Ed(who, as we all know, has pure aryan blood): Don't you mean Melbourne Football Club?) ).
He is a glowing example of the righteous man in a scurrilous world. Scurrilous, I say! Just think: without his generous mega-sheckel donations, the Israeli war criminal Arsehole Sharona and his extremist ruling Lickgood Party would be almost solely dependent on the USA for funding their war on Palestinians (sorry, war on terror).
Herewith, the aforementioned Xenox News wishes to reiterate its policy of freedom of association, freedom of publication, and freedom of expression.
Given that Monstralia has no such constitutional guarantees - and given that the United Empire of America is hell-bent on world domination both culturally AND militarily - we at Xenox News are here to demonstrate our demon-cratic right to tell it as we see it. We welcome all you mass-and-multi-media-addled jar-heads out there to do the same.
Use it or lose it, people!
This was Max Gross for Xenox News, standing up for free speech, steadfast, shredding and deleting, and totally outraged. Outraged, I say!