I haven't. Obviously I am failing to be properly provocative here, and am just going to have to get to work and libel more powerful, litigious figures. People aren't going to slander themselves, you know!
Once I get on that project, I will be pleased to be acquainted with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's overview of online defamation law.
As crudely summarized by me, it holds that in order for legal defamation to have occurred:
- I need to publish my statements to an audience beyond the person defamed (calling someone names to their face with no one else around doesn't count);
- I need to have made up (or copied from the untruths of another) the defamatory statements -- that is, facts about the person, however unflattering, are not defamatory;
- the statements must be broadly understood to be about the person (a claim of "I wasn't talking about you" must be unpersuasive), and to actually damage his or her reputation ("so-and-so seems to have been dressed by half-trained monkeys" is not defamatory).
Also, if the person is a public figure, he or she must prove I was acting maliciously, rather than just trying to be funny or something. Public figures have to deal with people saying obnoxious stuff about them.
Which, from my point of view, means it might be more work to actually defame a public figure, so I'd better go after my relatively unknown next door neighbor instead.
It's on my 'to do' list.
In the meantime, I am indebted to Feminist SF - The Blog! for the introduction to EFF, which has all sorts of other handy tidbits about law and blogs in their Blogger's Legal Guide. As they say,
Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.
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