What I love best about this is that the onion don’t fuck around to find out, they have the receipts that’ll stand up in court and lawyers who know how to best use them.

@BethanyBlack Oh yeah. I don't believe for a minute they'd have published it if they thought there was a chance they'd be successfully sued. Plus, parody and satire are strongly protected by the libel laws.

@nxylas @BethanyBlack not in England.

@ajlanes @BethanyBlack Since Rowling is in Scotland and The Onion is in the US, I'm not sure how relevant that is. But even in England and Wales, the laws were relaxed a few years ago to make parody and satire pretty much ironclad defences. It's what allowed 2000AD to finally reprint the Judge Dredd stories featuring Ronald McDonald and the Jolly Green Giant, for example.

@nxylas @BethanyBlack the Defamation Act 2013 is the current statutory framework and does not have defences for parody or satire. Since the Onion is in the US it benefits from the US protection from enforcement of foreign defamation judgments that are incompatible with the US Constitution 1st Amendment so there’s not a lot of point suing them. The largest risk is probably to those in England and Wales who repeat (republish) the libel by retweeting of boosting it.

@ajlanes @BethanyBlack Err...that would be me then. Now I have to ask myself whether I want to become a martyr for free speech or not.

@nxylas @BethanyBlack I am only a student lawyer and this is not legal advice. I think Rowling is more likely to go after individuals who make direct statements of their own than those who merely RT or boost.