2013 June 7

Browne v. Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd., 2013 ONSC 3348

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice sustained a defence objection at trial to the admissibility in the plaintiff’s case of evidence of republication of the allegedly defamatory website article on websites other than that of the defendant Toronto Star based on the results of Internet searches that her partner had conducted using Google and other search engines. Noting that pleadings play a critical role in defamation actions, the Court held that the plaintiff had failed to specifically plead the exceptions to the basic rule that each publisher is only responsible for its own act of publication. In this case, despite a pre-trial warning from the defence that the issue of republication on other internet sites had not been specifically pleaded, the plaintiff failed to seek an amendment. In conclusion, the Court stated: “While there may be cases of notoriety where, absent a specific pleading of an exception, a court might be prepared to find that the fact of publication of an article on the Internet was sufficient to raise the issue of republication by other Internet providers, this is not such a case.“