Libel Tourism: Why Librarians Should Care

The global exchange and purchase of information via the internet has undoubtedly enriched scholarly communication and library collections. But all sorts of legal and cultural barriers confront information crossing national borders. Consider a book published in the United States and sold on a global website. Persons or groups who believe that this book has defamed or inaccurately portrayed them can sue the author or publisher in any country where the book can be purchased-and where the libel laws might differ from those in the United States. This sort of legal action, known as “libel tourism,” has become an increasing threat to academic and intellectual freedom.

In the United States authors and publishers are generally protected by the First Amendment unless the plaintiff can prove that the book’s defamation or inaccuracies have malicious intent; as a result many aggrieved parties have turned to the British courts, where the rigorous libel law is far less friendly to authors and publishers. Imagine the shock when librarians received notice in spring 2007 from Britain’s much-revered Cambridge University Press (CUP) that they should remove from circulation the publisher’s 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by U.S. authors J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins. Saudi businessman Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz had filed a libel action lawsuit in the U.K. against CUP claiming the authors accused him—wrongfully and without evidence—of funding al-Qaeda.

What happened next is complex but not so unusual. Jeffrey A. Stern of the Los Angeles-based publisher Bonus Books sharply criticized Cambridge University Press’s action March 8, 2007, on thebookseller.com website: “Clearly [CUP] must have supported the material before they agreed to a publishing deal with Collins and Burr. It’s only now, after being slapped with a suit in the U.K. by the likes of Bin Mahfouz, that they have suddenly decided to concede to the demands to pull the book. What’s worse, they have not only agreed to pay damages but they have even gone so far as to issue a formal apology on their website, completely discrediting their authors as having made ‘defamatory allegations’ to which there was ‘no truth whatsoever.’”

Kevin Taylor, intellectual property director of Cambridge University Press, responded on September 8, 2007, that by the time CUP received notice of the pending legal action in March 2007, most of the copies of Alms had been sold. The publisher said it had not realized that the book contained defamatory statements about Bin Mahfouz. In the U.K., sources proven to be false and/or defamatory are subject to British libel law. Therefore, upon legal advice, CUP decided to pulp the remaining copies and notify libraries to remove the book from circulation. As Taylor stated: “Cambridge University Press is not in business to do ideological battle but to act responsibly as a publisher of scholarly material. It would not be a responsible use of our resources, nor in the interests of any of our scholarly authors, to attempt to defend a legal action in circumstances such as the above. Our decision to withdraw the book may indeed have been ‘un-American’ in Jeffrey A Stern’s sense of that term, but we are a global publisher with a duty to observe the laws of many different countries. Stern may have issues with English libel law, but he should not criticize a publisher for upholding its responsibility to stay within that law.” Cambridge University Press removed the book from its list in August 2007 and reportedly pulped the remaining copies in its possession.

Such actions should give librarians pause-especially those in libraries committed to collecting research materials for posterity. Alms for Jihad has essentially disappeared from the Cambridge University Press website as if it never existed. The book’s front cover image still appears in the Wikipedia entry on the book, although the article’s external web links to CUP are dead. (However, there is a live link leading to a PDF of the book’s contents on the Wikileaks website, which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents.) Fortunately, a quick search of OCLC’s WorldCat shows that 351 libraries worldwide created holdings for this book, so we can hope that most have retained it. And in a Google Books world, can content ever be irrevocably “pulped”? Yale University Press fought a similar case and won. In August 2007, Matthew Levitt’s 2006 book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad was targeted by KinderUSA, a charity accused in the book of funding terrorism.

According to an August 16, 2007 article in Inside Higher Education, Yale not only defended the book and its author, but filed a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) suit seeking to quash KinderUSA’s suit. (Ironically, this type of lawsuit can also chill speech when used against authors or groups that can’t afford to pay damages.) Importantly, Yale noted that the book had been subjected to peer review and copyediting, and the press defended the author’s claim that he had fact-checked his book.

There have been many similar lawsuits. For example, the June 18, 2008, Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the U.S. based College Art Association was forced to settle when a professor of art history was angered over a book review in CAA’s Art Journal. Palestinian Art (Reaktion Books, 2006), by Professor Gannit Ankori of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was reviewed unfavorably by Joseph Massad, a professor at Columbia University. In his review, Massad claimed that Professor Ankori did not credit her sources properly.