The 39-year-old man suspected of posing as the male prostitute who blogged about having sex with prominent South Africans has appeared in a magistrate's court in Cape Town on charges of theft and crimen injuria*.
The crimen injuria complaint against Juan Duval Uys was lodged by Simon Grindrod, the Independent Democrats councillor. Grindrod's name had been used on an Afrikaans blog, which claimed he had had sex with a prostitute named Skye, who is now believed to be Uys.
As you know, this is a really interesting - and important - case for bloggers. It sparked off debate around freedom of expression, internet regulation -- and proved that while the blogosphere is free, bloggers are a responsible lot.
Guy Berger recently presented a paper titled Caught in the middle – How a scurrilous South African blog raised the issues of freedom, regulation and responsibility at the AMIC conference in Singapore. In it, he writes: "The bloggers in this debate are people who place a high premium on freedom of expression. When they came up against someone who appeared – in terms of conservative attitudes to homosexuality and prostitution held by most bloggers – to abuse free speech on a public platform, most then felt the SA Male Prostitute [site] to be defamatory. Their solution was to defend their realm from external regulation, but some of them to both name and trace the culprit – in that way, balancing a potential conflict of rights."

Read today's IOL news story or the Times news story, which is a good backgrounder. And Vincent Maher's take on Uys's arrest a few weeks back.

* For those of you who missed the media law lecture, here's Wikipedia's definition of crimen injuria: Crimen injuria is a crime under South African common law, defined to be the act of "unlawfully, intentionally and seriously impairing the dignity of another." Although difficult to precisely define, the crime is used in the prosecution of certain instances of road rage, stalking, racially offensive language, emotional or psychological abuse and sexual offences against children.