Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Bloggers Beware!

Lawsuits and indictments showered on blogger....

A student was indicted last month after Taipei County commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) filed a lawsuit against him regarding contents on his blog.

During the campaign for the Taipei County commissioner election in 2005, Tseng Yen-wei (曾彥衛), a university student at the time, created a blog satirizing Chou, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate.

Tseng, now 24 years old, is a graduate student at National Taiwan Normal University.

Although Chou was elected, he filed a lawsuit against Tseng for "spreading rumors or untrue statements" with the "intention to prevent a candidate's election," aspersions and copyright violation.

The copyright violation action was because Chou believed that the name of Tseng's Web site, "Wiego's blog," was an imitation of Chou's official campaign Web site "Weigo's blog."

In addition, Chou also alleged that the logo which Tseng used on his blog was an imitation of Chou's official campaign logo.

Tseng denied that he had "spread rumors or untrue statements" with the "intention to prevent a candidate's election" as Chou had alleged, and defended his freedom of speech.

"I gathered all the information from the mass media, which was open to everybody," Tseng said.

"For example, Lo Wen-chia (羅文嘉) was the one who first talked about the Yung-chou case, and I merely quoted him," Tseng said. "How come it's not a problem to talk about it, but it is a problem to cite the information on the Web?"


I'm not going to say anything else. Conclusions are obvious.


4 comments:

Runsun said...

To my knowledge, Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) actually went to the police during the election campaign, weeks before he got elected. The police investigated, and found that what Tseng Yen-wei (曾彥衛) posted on the web was well within the range of seech freedom, so the police didn't do anything on him.

It's an extremely shock to me that after Chou got the power, Tseng's act has been turned from "legal" into "illegal".

Isn't it obvious that when you get the power, everything you did becomes legal, and everything against you becomes illegal ?

Knowing how these people operate, it won't be a surprise that Ma Ying-Jeou is so eager to campaign for the president upon his indictment.

Michael Turton said...

Thanks, Runsun. I think I remember hearing about this back then, come to think of it. That's useful information.

I too fear what will happen to the prosecutorial offices when Ma becomes President.

Michael

Anonymous said...

Back then, I remember Mr. Tseng was being harassed on the net and in real life, getting threatening phone calls etc., the common sense is that if you make the chinese/pan-blue people unhappy, that's the treatment you'll get.

Anonymous said...

http://solange.myweb.hinet.net/091801hu3.jpg