SpuriousLogic spotted this story on the BBC, from which he excerpts: "The High Court has given permission for an injunction to be served via social-networking site Twitter. The order is to be served against an unknown Twitter user who anonymously posts to the site using the same name as a right-wing political blogger. The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney's Blarney. The order says the Twitter user is breaching the copyright of Mr. Blaney. He told BBC News that the content being posted to Twitter in his name was 'mildly objectionable.' Mr. Blaney turned to Twitter to serve the injunction rather than go through the potentially lengthy process of contacting Twitter headquarters in California and asking it to deal with the matter. UK law states that an injunction does not have to be served in person and can be delivered by several different means including fax or e-mail."
Nice rant but the twitterer is being served an injunction [wikipedia.org] and not being sued at all . ..
Twitter is the delivery method, not named as a party to an action. If you mail someone an injunction, you are not serving an injunction on the post office, you are using the post office to serve a third party... same thing here.
For what is thought to be the first time Twitter is being used to send a court order to a user of the Twitter service.
Dude, seriously? You do realize that getting a court to issue an injunction requires first filing suit. That's why the first sentence of the wikipedia article calls an injunction a remedy at equity. It's something that a court of equity can issue as part of a judgment to make the parties whole again.
Ahh yes, you're right . . . I was completely ignorant, but thanks to your measured and intelligent response I did a bit of research and am suitably chastened. Thanks.
The twitter account in question is @blaneysblarney, which is the name of Mr Blaney's blog. The account photo is copied from Mr Blaney's blog. The first post of @blaneysblarney says "Comrades, I thought I would set up a more political twitter and keep my other twitter account for more personal stuff."
So it seems he's trying to prevent someone using his photo and the name of his blog to pass off their words as his. I'm guessing he's asserting copyright on his photo and the name of his blog, which seems reasonable.
The copyright assertion on the photo makes sense, but name of the blog can't be copyrighted. It's possible that he's claiming the name of his blog as a trademark, or, under the UK law for unregistered trademarks, "passing off." I would have thought you would have to actually be engaging in trade to make such a claim, and I don't think a blog qualifies; but I may be wrong about UK trademark law.
As soon as I posted, I realised that I'd probably overstated by mentioning copyright on the name of the blog... and just knew that would be the subject of the first reply: geeks will be geeks;-)
I am the REAL Donal Blaney, and I am appalled at these blatant attempts to smear my name and reputation on the Internet.
Rest assured that all such attempts are being monitored and recorded and that all those who attempt to act in such fashion will be prosecuted to the full extent of the laws pertinent to the case.
The REAL Donal Blarney
Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks, it's lost all the glitter and sparkle as my eyes have been gradually opened to the loss of privacy they effect and the risk of identity theft they engender. I've watched facebook degenerate into an oozing fest of self indulgence and crappy quizzes about peoples aura/star sign/some other mystic crap or how good they are in bed, and too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world as if they're some sort of celebrity and we're all supposed to be deeply concerned about them cutting their pinky finger or enraptured by their new haircut, etc etc. A friend related similar sentiments to me earlier today, saying people were using it as if it were twitter.
What concerns me the most is the loss of privacy entailed in having an account with any of these sites, knowing that cops and employers can pull up all this info instantly... it's a worry.
Enough ranting for me, I'm going to delete my facebook account and my twitter account (which I created once and used never:P)
Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks
You can't. It's cursed.
I mean, do you honestly believe you are allowed to do that in the first place? As today's business best practice is to bury terms like "we retain the right of owing your data for as long as we are pleased, even if after you 'delete' your account" in the crap known as "the License Agreement", prepare to fight through legal obstacles and win a Pyrrhic victory at the cost of a kidney and a liver before you can really delete all your social-networking accounts, if for some reason you can win at all.
Don't delete them. Instead, open hundreds or even thousands of accounts in your own name, all with bogus and different info. Write a little script to randomly trawl other people's accounts for messages/photos/etc and copy them at random to your own hundreds of accounts, as if they were real postings. Noone would know the difference. Then if your employer/the police/whoever tried to dig up any dirt on you, it would be buried among such a volume of spam that finding it would be a Herculean task.
No doubt the social networking sites would try to shut you down somehow, but surely on Slashdot noone has to explain how to cover your tracks well enough to make it unreasonably difficult for them.
And best of all - Facebook and Twitter can keep reporting in the press "Look, our membership base is growing by a x million accounts a day! At this rate, we will have more subscriptions than there are people on the planet in just a few months! Advertisers flock to us!"... everyone wins!
Noone would know the difference. on Slashdot noone has to explain
I can't find that word in the dictionary. Is it pronounced "noon" or "noonie"? And what, exactly, does it mean? I tried to look it up on Google but it said "do you mean no one?" so I'm still clueless. Sorry my literacy is so low...
too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world
Would you consider their decision to delete their social networking sites a mundane details of their life? and the fact that they only ever used these once? I would.
Just sayin'
I've watched facebook degenerate into an oozing fest of self indulgence and crappy quizzes about peoples aura/star sign/some other mystic crap or how good they are in bed, and too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world as if they're some sort of celebrity and we're all supposed to be deeply concerned about them cutting their pinky finger or enraptured by their new haircut, etc etc.
A great many people think that their lives are far more important and eventful than those of others, without making the mental leap to realise that other people think the same about their own.
i need to get a life? bro it sounds like you and your friends need to get some lives i mean fuck facebook isnt supposed to be life its supposed to supplement life to make it easier like knowing when to meet up with people and whats going on but i guess that concept is too foreign to/.ers who just cant get their heads out of their asses that a real world exists off of the computer and people who partake in it like using technology to assist them
seriously/. is full of luddites and everyone who says "im c
Oh, you can deliver an injunction anywhere.
Hell, if they were on the Moon, as long as they can receive it, you can deliver it.
The correct question here is "if they're not in the UK, is there anything stopping them from just completely ignoring it?" and the answer would be "no".
Of course, you next recourse then would be to either attempt to get the criminal courts involved, so you can have them extradited (doubtful in this case;the courts are rightly leery of getting involved in civil actions like this), or you go to the country they're in (e.g. the US) and get a judgement against them there, which depending on the locale can be easy or hard. In the EU, the court would be likely to take the UK's court decision into consideration, likewise the US, Canada and other commonwealth nations.
China or Nigeria etc., not so much.
Those can also be one-way. For example, the US can make Britain extradite random British citizens to be tried in the US for alleged crimes comitted anywhere in the world, but Britain cannot make the US extradite a US citizen to face a British court.
Apples and oranges.
Three cheers for finally serving a court order against that anonymous coward bastard. He's always cluttering up slashdot with horse porn stories, trolling posts and all sorts of objectionable and inflamatory shite. Maybe now the Internet-web-thingie will be easy to use and headache free and we'll only ever have truth posted! Yay!
Actually, "Anonymous coward" is exactly the term the real Blarney actually used on his blog [blogspot.com], writing "I successfully obtained, thanks to the masterful advocacy of Matthew Richardson, in the High Court today compelling an anonymous coward to stop pretending to be me on Twitter and to reveal his or her identity.".
Pinocchio and Rumplestilskin are said to be quaking in their boots.
In all honesty if you can't be bothered going through the motion of finding out who this anonymous poster is, what are the chances that there will be any consequences to face if he doesn't abide by the order? This seems like a waste of court time and money. But it doesn't surprise me. We don't have one sane legal system on the planet that isn't steeped in medieval nonsense. Well at least we've gotten over trying donkeys for adultery.
Disclaimer : IANAL , But I'm smarter than some so called legal professionals who put disclaimers at the end of the text NOT the beginning - duh!
I believe its a discretionary power of the court and as such is done by application typically with supporting evidence that normal methods have been tried without success or that they are less applicable due to the location of party. (I had occasion to help provide the supporting evidence which led to such a succesful application)
"The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney's Blarney."
it turns out the Anonymous poster was named Donal Blaney. Well then his copy write to the name is nothing more then toilet paper to said person
What if Donal Blaney is his real name? Or better yet, since names can apparently be copywrited, what if the Twitter Donal Blaney is older than the Donal Blaney at Blaney's Blarney? Can the Twitter Donal Blaney sue the other one to force him to change the name of his blog?
If the target of this injunction is anonymous, how can the writ be enforced? If he (or she) decides to ignore it, there seems very little that the server can do. It sounds to me like there is a good chance that the law will be shown to be an ass in this case.
Um, 2 things: 1. If he's posting anonymously, how is he using a name (I've quite possibly missed something, being as it is that I don't use twitter)? 2. More importantly, what if said anonymous person has the same name as Donal Blaney?
The law firm serving the order is Blaney's own law firm. The whole thing sounds like a publicity stunt. The reason Blaney isn't serving the order in California is because it would be worthless: you can't copyright a name, and people have a right to anonymous free speech and satire. For an anonymous author to use a slightly offensive variation of Blaney's name to make fun of him and his positions is precisely what US free speech laws are about.
There's a bit of a difference between your case of the real James Bond and Ian Fleming's James Bond. The real James Bond wasn't a spy, and Ian Fleming certainly wasn't trying to pass of the books' character James Bond as if they were the real James Bond-the-spy. The real james bond was an ornithologist, says wikipedia with some citation to lord knows whether it's a credible source, but whatever.
This Donal Blaney chap, however, is complaining that somebody else posting under the name Donal Blaney is actually trying to pass themselves off as being this particular Donal Blaney chap... using not only his name, but his picture, his actual blog's name, etc.
Whether or not he has a case will be up to the courts to decide anyway, but I do believe he's got -a- point.. even if it's not a very sharp one, given that twitter does usually look into these things to make sure celebrities get to use their own name if a fan or foe set up a twitter account with that celebrity's name and was posing as them. ( not too sure what they do if it's really just an account from somebody else with the same name and they do -not- pose as the celebrity; I should hope they'd tell the celeb to go take a hike and open a new account under a different name. )
You can attempt to trademark your own name, but it rarely holds up in court, especially against the many fair use defenses. I should know. I run a website that had to deal with a WIPO dispute [google.com] from a woman claiming her name was trademarked (decision here [wipo.int], full details and all case files here [fornits.com]). Her argument was similar that a person could misunderstand my site to be hers, but even if that were true, there are cases dealing with that specifically, finding it to be acceptable for public comment purposes (form of protest). One of the funny things is she registered the mark only after I put up the website about her.
Trademarks are not the same thing as copyright. Copyright covers creative, intellectual, scientific, or artistic forms, or "works". Names are generally not considered to be part of that. Even if there was a possibility of having a copyright on a name, this guy wouldn't own the copyright, but his parents do. They "created" the name.
Yes, but that's not what the article implies. It says he was posing as Donal Blarney, not copying his work. All in all I think Donal is doing this not to get something removed from the internet, but for attention, and to portray himself as some sort of martyr/avatar of justice who stands up against the legions of internet ruffians. He's more or less an attention seeking troll and I think we all play a part in the guilt of feeding him. Take a look at his blog and tell me he doesn't strike you as the sort of person who would do that.
The twitterer isn't actually using Donal Blarney's name, they're using the name of his blog. Maybe he's claiming the name of the blog as a trademark? Most of the news reports seem to be parotting the law firm [griffinlaw.co.uk], who say that the twitterer is "breaching the copyright and intellectual property of the blogâ(TM)s owner," which is some uselessly vague bollocks, unfortunately, as it doesn't say what the intellectual property involved actually is.
Copyright on his name? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
You're missing that you can sue anyone for anything and they have to show up, no matter how stupid the claims.
Thankfully some courts don't like this stuff and hand out stiff penalties for it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nice rant but the twitterer is being served an injunction [wikipedia.org] and not being sued at all . . .
Twitter is the delivery method, not named as a party to an action. If you mail someone an injunction, you are not serving an injunction on the post office, you are using the post office to serve a third party... same thing here.
For what is thought to be the first time Twitter is being used to send a court order to a user of the Twitter service.
Yet another reason not to use the thing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nevertheless, how do you take legal action against people you don't even know what country they're in?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, seriously? You do realize that getting a court to issue an injunction requires first filing suit. That's why the first sentence of the wikipedia article calls an injunction a remedy at equity. It's something that a court of equity can issue as part of a judgment to make the parties whole again.
Re:Sued? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Copyright on his name? (Score:5, Informative)
The twitter account in question is @blaneysblarney, which is the name of Mr Blaney's blog. The account photo is copied from Mr Blaney's blog. The first post of @blaneysblarney says "Comrades, I thought I would set up a more political twitter and keep my other twitter account for more personal stuff."
So it seems he's trying to prevent someone using his photo and the name of his blog to pass off their words as his. I'm guessing he's asserting copyright on his photo and the name of his blog, which seems reasonable.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The copyright assertion on the photo makes sense, but name of the blog can't be copyrighted. It's possible that he's claiming the name of his blog as a trademark, or, under the UK law for unregistered trademarks, "passing off." I would have thought you would have to actually be engaging in trade to make such a claim, and I don't think a blog qualifies; but I may be wrong about UK trademark law.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As soon as I posted, I realised that I'd probably overstated by mentioning copyright on the name of the blog ... and just knew that would be the subject of the first reply: geeks will be geeks ;-)
Cue the deluge of people... (Score:5, Funny)
claiming to be this guy in various contexts. Streisand effect here we come.
Re:Cue the deluge of people... (Score:5, Funny)
claiming to be this guy in various contexts. Streisand effect here we come.
Don't matter I'll sue them all!!!
I have friends in thee RIAA!
Parent
Poster above is an impostor and a liar! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Cue the deluge of people... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Thats about it for me (Score:5, Insightful)
What concerns me the most is the loss of privacy entailed in having an account with any of these sites, knowing that cops and employers can pull up all this info instantly... it's a worry. Enough ranting for me, I'm going to delete my facebook account and my twitter account (which I created once and used never
Re:Thats about it for me (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't. It's cursed.
I mean, do you honestly believe you are allowed to do that in the first place? As today's business best practice is to bury terms like "we retain the right of owing your data for as long as we are pleased, even if after you 'delete' your account" in the crap known as "the License Agreement", prepare to fight through legal obstacles and win a Pyrrhic victory at the cost of a kidney and a liver before you can really delete all your social-networking accounts, if for some reason you can win at all.
Parent
Re:Thats about it for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't delete them. Instead, open hundreds or even thousands of accounts in your own name, all with bogus and different info. Write a little script to randomly trawl other people's accounts for messages/photos/etc and copy them at random to your own hundreds of accounts, as if they were real postings. Noone would know the difference. Then if your employer/the police/whoever tried to dig up any dirt on you, it would be buried among such a volume of spam that finding it would be a Herculean task.
No doubt the social networking sites would try to shut you down somehow, but surely on Slashdot noone has to explain how to cover your tracks well enough to make it unreasonably difficult for them.
And best of all - Facebook and Twitter can keep reporting in the press "Look, our membership base is growing by a x million accounts a day! At this rate, we will have more subscriptions than there are people on the planet in just a few months! Advertisers flock to us!" ... everyone wins!
Parent
Re:Thats about it for me (Score:4, Funny)
Noone would know the difference. on Slashdot noone has to explain
I can't find that word in the dictionary. Is it pronounced "noon" or "noonie"? And what, exactly, does it mean? I tried to look it up on Google but it said "do you mean no one?" so I'm still clueless. Sorry my literacy is so low...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Noone? He's a detective.
No matter how hard you try to hide your information, Noone will find out. That's because Noone cares.
Who is 'Anonymous'? Noone knows his name. Noone knows where he lives. Noone can destroy him.
When you're in deep trouble, Noone can save you. Trust Noone.
Re:Thats about it for me (Score:5, Funny)
too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world
Would you consider their decision to delete their social networking sites a mundane details of their life? and the fact that they only ever used these once? I would. Just sayin'
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've watched facebook degenerate into an oozing fest of self indulgence and crappy quizzes about peoples aura/star sign/some other mystic crap or how good they are in bed, and too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world as if they're some sort of celebrity and we're all supposed to be deeply concerned about them cutting their pinky finger or enraptured by their new haircut, etc etc.
A great many people think that their lives are far more important and eventful than those of others, without making the mental leap to realise that other people think the same about their own.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks, it's lost all the glitter and sparkle
It ever had any?
Re:Thats about it for me (Score:5, Funny)
Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks
too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world
Mmmmmm, delicious irony.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
seriously
Jurisdiction? (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, but if the person in question is not a UK citizen, does the UK law, which says the injunction can be sent by fax or email, apply?
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
They finally got anonymous coward! (Score:5, Funny)
Three cheers for finally serving a court order against that anonymous coward bastard. He's always cluttering up slashdot with horse porn stories, trolling posts and all sorts of objectionable and inflamatory shite. Maybe now the Internet-web-thingie will be easy to use and headache free and we'll only ever have truth posted! Yay!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah!
Re:They finally got anonymous coward! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Court order served against fictional characters! (Score:2)
Pinocchio and Rumplestilskin are said to be quaking in their boots.
In all honesty if you can't be bothered going through the motion of finding out who this anonymous poster is, what are the chances that there will be any consequences to face if he doesn't abide by the order? This seems like a waste of court time and money. But it doesn't surprise me. We don't have one sane legal system on the planet that isn't steeped in medieval nonsense. Well at least we've gotten over trying donkeys for adultery.
http://e [wikipedia.org]
Re:Court order served against fictional characters (Score:4, Insightful)
"Modding down to bury an inconvenient truth doesn't change that truth but does make you look foolish"
Modding is anonymous, no one looks like anything.
Parent
Discretionary Power of court to serve by email (Score:2, Interesting)
Disclaimer : IANAL , But I'm smarter than some so called legal professionals who put disclaimers at the end of the text NOT the beginning - duh!
I believe its a discretionary power of the court and as such is done by application typically with supporting evidence that normal methods have been tried without success or that they are less applicable due to the location of party.
(I had occasion to help provide the supporting evidence which led to such a succesful application)
it would be funny (Score:2)
What if there are two Donal Blaneys? (Score:4, Interesting)
STOP IMPERSONATING ME! (Score:2, Funny)
I said STOP impersonating me!
Just to Aid the Inevitable (Score:3, Interesting)
Now go comment internet and Donal. May anonymous never find offense with what you are doing, or this might just be throwing water onto scalding oil.
serving is one thing ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the target of this injunction is anonymous, how can the writ be enforced? If he (or she) decides to ignore it, there seems very little that the server can do. It sounds to me like there is a good chance that the law will be shown to be an ass in this case.
LEAVE ME ALONE (Score:5, Funny)
Stop posting as me,
I'll sue!!!!
you have been warned
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
something just doesn't make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, 2 things:
1. If he's posting anonymously, how is he using a name (I've quite possibly missed something, being as it is that I don't use twitter)?
2. More importantly, what if said anonymous person has the same name as Donal Blaney?
publicity stunt (Score:5, Informative)
The law firm serving the order is Blaney's own law firm. The whole thing sounds like a publicity stunt. The reason Blaney isn't serving the order in California is because it would be worthless: you can't copyright a name, and people have a right to anonymous free speech and satire. For an anonymous author to use a slightly offensive variation of Blaney's name to make fun of him and his positions is precisely what US free speech laws are about.
The real question (Score:3, Interesting)
How many tweets does it take to serve an injunction? Breaking down legal verbiage into 140 character chunks must be a job in itself.
Re:Yet another reason to hate people. (Score:5, Insightful)
*twitch*
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=intensive+purposes [urbandictionary.com]
THAT out of the way...
There's a bit of a difference between your case of the real James Bond and Ian Fleming's James Bond. The real James Bond wasn't a spy, and Ian Fleming certainly wasn't trying to pass of the books' character James Bond as if they were the real James Bond-the-spy.
The real james bond was an ornithologist, says wikipedia with some citation to lord knows whether it's a credible source, but whatever.
This Donal Blaney chap, however, is complaining that somebody else posting under the name Donal Blaney is actually trying to pass themselves off as being this particular Donal Blaney chap... using not only his name, but his picture, his actual blog's name, etc.
Whether or not he has a case will be up to the courts to decide anyway, but I do believe he's got -a- point.. even if it's not a very sharp one, given that twitter does usually look into these things to make sure celebrities get to use their own name if a fan or foe set up a twitter account with that celebrity's name and was posing as them.
( not too sure what they do if it's really just an account from somebody else with the same name and they do -not- pose as the celebrity; I should hope they'd tell the celeb to go take a hike and open a new account under a different name. )
Parent
Re:Copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Trademarks are not the same thing as copyright. Copyright covers creative, intellectual, scientific, or artistic forms, or "works". Names are generally not considered to be part of that. Even if there was a possibility of having a copyright on a name, this guy wouldn't own the copyright, but his parents do. They "created" the name.
Re:Copyright? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Copyright? (Score:5, Informative)
The twitterer isn't actually using Donal Blarney's name, they're using the name of his blog. Maybe he's claiming the name of the blog as a trademark? Most of the news reports seem to be parotting the law firm [griffinlaw.co.uk], who say that the twitterer is "breaching the copyright and intellectual property of the blogâ(TM)s owner," which is some uselessly vague bollocks, unfortunately, as it doesn't say what the intellectual property involved actually is.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What's stopping me from mailing, twittering and faxing a few million people injunctions?
The same thing that's stopping you from sentencing a million people to 20 years in jail. Only a court can issue an injunction.