| Freedom of speech simply means the rights that people express their own comments freely according to their wishes and listen to others’statements. With the advent of the Internet Era, the Internet has increasingly become an ideal place to express comments. Due to the variety and diversity of rights, along with many characteristics of the Internet itself, such as anonymity, openness and instant interactivity, one may usually infringe public interests and others’ legal rights when he exercises rights of the freedom of speech. Meanwhile, as a most basic and most important constitutional right for citizens, freedom of speech is not only the precondition for self-realization and self-development, but also facilitates the advancement of a democratic society. In real life, how to define the legal boundary of freedom of speech on the Internet has become a problem worthy of study and is the focus of this article. How to properly deal with the relationship between freedom of speech and public interests and others’ legal rights is of great significance for maintaining freedom of speech of citizens and thus facilitating the construction of a society under the rule of law. This article is divided into three parts-introduction, main body and conclusion, which discusses the value and theory of constraints of freedom of speech on the Internet in detail. Through analysis of the case of "Qin Huohuo" and discussion of Interpretations of several questions about applicable laws for dealing with criminal cases(like making slanders by using information network) by Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate, this article expects to lead readers to think about it from a macroscopic perspective. In this article, the main body can mainly be divided into three parts:The first part of this article is the theory summary of the freedom of speech on the Internet as a whole. Firstly, it outlined the meaning of freedom of speech, which includes two levels-a narrow sense and a broad sense; based on the need of study, this article only analyzes the freedom of speech in a narrow sense; that is to say, it excludes the freedom of speech in a a broad sense, such as news, publication, march, demonstration and etc. Except for the general cognition that the freedom of speech is included in constitutional rights, the author refers to views of Professor Liu Zuoxiang, that is, freedom of speech is also a personal right and individual right. Secondly, the author analyzes the important values of freedom of speech from two levels of individual and society-construction of self-personality, democracy promotion, promotion of tolerance, maintaining of ethical foundation for society, promoting the development of social economy and culture and etc. Thirdly, the author systematically sorts out legal regulations about freedom of speech at home and abroad nowadays and analyzes emphatically problems and deficiencies existing in legal regulations on freedom of speech of our country. Lastly, the author focuses on the analysis of new development of freedom of speech in the Internet environment and puts forward some of questions.The author focuses on the analysis of theory of constraints for freedom of speech in the second part. Firstly, the problem of right conflict is presented. In the view of the author, the cognition for this problem is the precondition for understanding the legal boundary of Internet freedom of speech. The author outlines the problem of right conflict in detail from the following five aspects:whether the right conflict exists; what is the right conflict; the main subject of the right conflict; causes and substances of the right conflict; solutions for the right conflict. Now, the presence of right conflict is the consensus of academic circles. For the main subject of right conflict, the author introduces the opinions of Professor Zhang Qianfan, which inspires readers to think about it from a different perspective. For causes and substances of the right conflict, the author introduces different cognitions of scholars for this problem. Lastly, as scholars provides their own solutions for the right conflict from different theoretical perspectives, such as jurisprudence of economic analysis of utilitarian principle, legal principles, methodology of jurisprudence and etc, the author makes his own comments for this. Secondly, the four reasons for limitation of freedom of speech (others’ rights and reputation, national safety, public order and public morality) and three principles for limitation of freedom of speech (legality, purposiveness, proportional principle) are analyzed in this article.In the third part, it takes the "Qin Huohuo" case as an example to discuss problems existing in Internet freedom of speech. Firstly, the author simply introduces details of this case; then, the author analyses the crime of defamation involved in this case from the aspect of traditional criminal theory; next, the author presents the ground of defense-real or proved justified, privilege, fair comment, and incomplete reply-for crime of defamation according to the common law. Lastly, it analyzes the problems existing in this case one by one and focuses on the comments and analysis of Interpretation of Defamation Law by Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which analyzes the possible significant impacts of the "Qin Huohuo" case from a macroscopic perspective and proposes the necessity of parallel development ofrule of law and moral self-discipline.In the conclusion, the author appeals for the importance of freedom of speech again. Through exploration of legal boundary for freedom of speech, the author expects to inspire readers to think about current social issues from a macroscopic perspective; through cognition of inter-relationship between freedom of speech, constitutionalism and judicial independence and their importance for construction of a society with rule of law, the author comes to a conclusion that freedom of speech is the precondition for cultivating the rational thinking of democratic society citizens. |
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