Stephen: the legal side of things is less than relevant. Bluntly, Joe's blog provided an excuse to sack him: I strongly suspect that it was discovered via Google search. This is a blog that, prior to the whole affair blowing up, had roughly twenty regular readers (according to the guy who hosts it). Bear in mind that HMV and the current manager of Waterstones' Edinburgh east-end branch have been running the shop for less than a year. Bear in mind also that a lot of the stuff they dredged up is more than two years old, and therefore cannot possibly be construed as referring to current management.

By saying "If Waterstones win such proceedings, they'll have effectively established that employers can exercise prior restraint on anything their employees care to publish outside of their job" I was not talking about matters of legal precedent in this specific case, but the practical effect on employee behaviour, which is: write something outside of work without their explicit permission and your employers may use it against you if they want to fire you.

I'm not a lawyer; I'm a writer, with writerly concerns. This particular one -- how to square being a writer with having a day job -- used to be a major one for me. Many managers see having any outside interests at all (hobbies, even) as a kind of threat: that is, they view them as a drain on the employees' enthusiasm for their job. This has implications far beyond "blogger fired for being rude about employers".