Ed Brayton

“ Brayton Now this is in lieu of...of a libel suit. Why didn’t he just file a libel suit? Randazza Because it would have been, I think, you know, I put in a letter to him that it would be humiliatingly doomed. When it, when you, if you have a very, very basic and uninformed op-, understanding of libel law, you might say, OK, the website says Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990. Well, that’s a statement of fact. It’s not true. Therefore it’s defamation. But that’s not how it works. Context is everything. ”

“ You know, I find that, first off, I found when I went to law school that there seems to be this requirement that in order to go to law school you have to have uh, you know, a stick up your butt and then law school finds the people that don’t have that and puts one there and then finds everybody and tries to pound it up there even farther. ”

“ They can apply almost any legal principle they want, although there is a sort of a conglomeration of where all of our international legal principles come together and that’s something you can count on there. ”

“ Um, you know, we are part of the reason I think that people don’t identify with lawyers or like lawyers is that we try to...we collectively try to act like we’re so different from everybody else. We’re not. ”

“ Now you mentioned earlier this notion of internet memes and in one of your, the uh, appendices to this you went to a lot of trouble to explain to this panel the idea of internet memes. You provided a list of some of the biggest ones from LOLcats to “all your base are belong to us” which anybody sort of familiar with uh, with this sort of thing happens and this one sort of started out as a um, Comedy Central Roast and a Gilbert Gottfried joke and it just kept spreading and kept spreading until someone finally applied it to Glenn Beck and then apparently it was a Fark, the Fark website, I... ”

“ Brayton True. Randazza So, when it comes to defaming a public figure, now remember here,you know, your listeners out there, the average citizen only has to show a low level of uh, of wrongdoing in order to prevail in a libel action. But a public figure, somebody who has purposely seized the limelight and who has access to the media, has to show something called actual malice. ”

“ European arbitrators tend to give those to the complainant and Americans tend to not to. So what I did is I simply asked Mr. Beck to uh, through his lawyers, to stipulate that the First Amendment should apply to these proceedings. I thought that, as a patriotic American going to WIPO with another patriotic American, we’d all want the First Amendment to apply. ”