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Proposed libel law changes

Following an 18-month review, the Commons Culture, Media and Sports Committee has recommended a number of changes to libel legislation, but stopped short of calling for a new privacy law.

The proposals include:

• Changing the Press Complaints Commission's code to require subjects of articles to be notified before publication, thus allowing them the opportunity to comment. Any breach would be taken into consideration when assessing damages in privacy cases.
• Amending the Defamation Act 1996 to give the defence of responsible journalism legal status.
• Introducing a 'corporate defamation' tort, under which companies would have to prove 'actual damage' to their business.
• Amending the Civil Procedure Rules to make it harder for claimants to take advantage of UK laws when neither party in the case works or lives here.
• Introducing a one-year limit on actions relating to articles downloaded from the internet. Currently, each download is counted as a new publication.

While the Committee supported the Ministry of Justice's limit on the level of fees that could be recovered from the losing party in cases brought under conditional fee arrangements, it rejected a similar cap on the level of success fees, as well as the proposal to not recover these fees from the losing party.

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