With Bob Piper back on line I can now return to barely noticing his thoughts as they drift past on my feedreader. Chicken Yoghurt has the best summary of what has transpired with a list of 190+ bloggers who got aeriated about lawyers silencing bloggers who’d said nothing about their clients. Ministry of Truth is thoughtful and thorough about what this might mean for the UK, blogging and libel laws:

Hosting blogs in United States is a useful workaround but one that is far from being the ideal solution. What would be better would be for Britain’s framework of libel and defamation laws to be brought out much more into line with those of United States of America – and a proper constitutional law guaranteeing freedom of speech would be even better still.

We need to change the law, it’s as simple as that. But the $64,000 question is how?

There is a simple change that could easily be made that would improve things almost immediately by freeing UK-based web hosts from the threat of litigation as nominal publishers of third-party content hosted on their server…

Read the whole post for suggestions on how bloggers might nullify juries in libel cases.The Bondian villain is captured in the cartoon from Ralf Zeigermann.