Apparently he decided to only go after those he thinks he might actually get money from, if he wins :
(Daily Telegraph associate editor and blogger) Tim Blair is now suing Eric Beecher's Private Media, publisher of the website crikey.com.au, in the NSW Supreme Court for defamation. He is understood to want tens of thousands of dollars because of the damage to his reputation.
Damage to his reputation? I thought his reputation as a journalist was damaged almost beyond repair years before when he and his gormless commenters spent months attacking the character and motivations of an American mother whose young soldier son died in the Iraq War....
More from Sean Nicholls & Jessica Mahar :
Here's the (now deleted) early March 2009 apology from Crikey's Pure Poison that failed to repair the immeasurable hurt allegedly caused :....the Diary understands the trouble began when one of Crikey's bloggers noticed that the IP address - or computer identification number - of one of the people commenting on Blair's blog was identical to Blair's own IP address. In effect, the blogger wrote, Blair was so hard up for comments to his blog that he had resorted to writing his own comments, under another name. It sparked almost a year of demands by Blair, through his lawyers, that Crikey atone for what he says is a false accusation. While the blogger published an apology of sorts early in the piece, Blair was unsatisfied because he thought it repeated the alleged defamation. A couple of weeks ago he took the matter to court.
Correction and apology to Tim BlairBlair's Law appears to be true, after all.
In a post last night titled “Sockpuppet Worn” it was suggested that enthusiastic Pure Poison critic “WB"....had been making comments from Tim Blair’s private IP adress. The post, now removed from the Crikey site, included speculation on the identity of WB, concluding that it was Blair. Tim denies this flatly, and notes that people in the same house would share an IP. Commenters to the original deleted post had also made that point. We don’t know any more than that WB comments from the same private IP. Our criticisms are reserved for whoever “WB” turns out to be. We unreservedly withdraw any allegation that Tim has been using the “WB” identity, that he had personally used this identity to artificially boost his “hits”, and apologise for any offence caused by the above.
No typing cats were harmed, immeasurably or otherwise, in the posting of this story.
