The man who headed the exhaustive inquiry into the British media following the phone hacking scandal has cast his eye on the internet and asked if the enforcement of civil law is possible in the online world.
In a speech entitled Hold the Front Page: News Gathering in a Time of Change at Melbourne University, Lord Justice Brian Leveson said the rise of internet bloggers, who seem to operate above the law, may force more mainstream media to cut corners.
"It is sometimes suggested that the growth of the internet has made effective enforcement of the civil law more difficult, if not impossible," he said.
"Some have suggested that the internet is like the Wild West, and one without an effective sheriff or a Wyatt Earp to ride into town."
He pointed to a celebrity case in the UK where names were doing the rounds with bloggers and tweeters despite an injunction and the mainstream media had to stand on the sidelines and watch.
"This situation clearly exacerbated the media's concerns," Lord Justice Leveson said.
"They were subject to the injunctions, and were liable to the force of the law if they breached them.
"They had, however, to watch the very same injunctions being breached with apparent impunity by many thousands on the internet."
He said the frustration of established journalists could lead them to attempt to compete with bloggers by becoming less scrupulous in the way they gathered news.
"It may encourage unethical and potentially unlawful practice to get a story," he said.
He said such a situation could come about if an established newspaper moved entirely online or moved its base outside the jurisdiction in which it targets its readers.
But if they were then seen to be regularly acting in breach of the law, they would start to lose their authoritative voice.
"If they lost that voice they would simply be one more online purveyor of gossip with the attendant loss of influence which that would entail," Lord Justice Leveson said.
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