Hosting outside uk for legal reasons

Hosting

[meanweaver]

I currently upkeep a site for a prisoner, Many people feel he is wrongly convicted so we put all his latest news towards his fight for freedom on the site, However his family who feel he is guilty are millionaires and are starting legal proceedings to close the site down they claim for defamation. I use a small company as a backbone provider and the url and hosting is all in there name, but it looks like they are going to be taken to court and forced to supply my name so i can be sued, and they are now pulling the plug on the site as a result, I was looking at hosting abroad to keep the site up and make it impossible to track back to the webmaster ie me.
Has anyone had any experience with this before and know what avenues I can take.

Regards Ian

[ReliableSol]

Hi Ian,
There are several services around the world that do that but most are pretty pricey. The vast majority of hosts will pull the plug if you have illegal content on your site. Defamation = illegal content.

So step one is to review your site content. To protect yourself you need to make sure you have only verifiable facts about the case on the site. It is not defamation to tell the truth about someone, but you must be able to prove that truth. The big problem with defo is that in most cases it pushes the onus of proof onto the defendant, to prove that their actions were legitimate, which is unlike most other actions where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff.

Simply the word of the prisoner, is not sufficient to prove the truth of a fact, unless the site reports it as :prisoner name: has said that "insert quote".

Unfortuneately with most Court cases, especially civil proceeding, money wins.

Moving your site out of the jurisdiction, is probably wise, as it increases the families cost to bring the action (which may be a deterent), but you really would need to get good legal advice, as there have now been several precendent cases where the fact that a site is viewable within a jurisdiction is considered 'publishing' in that jurisdiction. So if you host your site in the Carribean but you are a UK webmaster, and the family views the site in the UK, they could still proceed in the UK Courts.

I know that France did it with Ebay, and an Australian in Victoria did it against a US website. So do tread carefully.

The main advantage of overseas hosting is that it is harder for a jurisdiction to raid the datacenter and impound the tapes and hard-drives. However the threat of legal action is normally enough to get you shut down.

Kerry

[denisdekat]

maybe consider this:

[katzglobal.com...]

[meanweaver]

Thanks for the reply so far, Well all the info on the site can be backed up with legal documentation, it seems to be a grey area as to what defamation is, The legal papers sent to my host state just 5 lines from a mass of content and it looks like he will have to go to court where he will be forced to hand over my name, However as it turns out the prisoners solicitor is now going to have the url put in his name which has surprised me, so it looks like the site will be up within a week, however i will be having the hosting in my name but i think its whos name the url is in that they will go after, or at least i hope so, well dont know what the outcome will be but thanks again for all advice so far.

Regards