Australia: Defamation law reforms on the horizon for digital intermediaries

In short, the Part A reforms include (among other things):

• two new conditional exemptions from liability for defamation targeting narrow classes of digital intermediaries – specifically:
  • passive intermediaries in relation to publication of digital matter using a ‘caching service’, ‘conduit service’ or ‘storage service’ (each being a defined term in the draft legislation); and
  • ‘search engine providers’ in relation to publication of automatically generated ‘search results’ or digital matter to which automatically generated search results provide a hyperlink (but excluding sponsored search results and autocomplete predictive text suggestions);
• a requirement that judicial officers in defamation proceedings determine whether a…