From CBC Ottawa:
A landlord is threatening to evict a Kingston woman from her apartment for criticizing him on her blog, raising questions about how libel laws apply to the internet.
Two weeks ago, Sarah Dawe received a notice from Homestead Land Holdings Ltd., the company that owns the apartment building, accusing her of libel and asking her to vacate the building because of her online comments.
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She first launched a website, and later a personal blog, after becoming frustrated with the company’s response to her complaints. The website has since been removed by the service provider. Dawe claims it was because of intervention by the landlord.
Dawe has continued to chronicle her fight with Homestead [Land Holdings Ltd.] on her blog, which is still up and running.
Apparently, Ms. Dawe, who was running a blog on Lycos, but has moved it to Kingstonkittens5 on Blogger, has run into some difficulties with her landlord, a company called Homestead Land Holdings.
“When I got the notice, I went into a panic, I couldn’t eat or sleep for four days,” said Dawe, who lives on The Parkway. On Dec. 8, she received a letter from one of Homestead’s lawyers, Donald B. Bayne, stating the company and its employees named on the site “take very seriously the false, malicious and libellous statements you have published about them on your website,” and that the company had complained to her site host, Lycos, which took the page down.
She reposted the material on a Google blog as it is U.S. based, the laws protecting Internet Service Providers are different than in Canada and they are more difficult to sue and on Feb. 10, got an eviction notice with the blog cited as the sole reason. It stated that Dawe was using the site “to publicly denounce and harass the landlord and its employees with malicious untruths” and said it would evict her if she didn’t take it down.
evict, Kingston, blog, libel, Sarah Dawe, Homestead Land Holdings
