UK Court Order Served Over Twitter, To Anonymous User Posing As Another 205
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."
Copyright on his name? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Yet another reason to hate people. (Score:1, Interesting)
If the real Mr. Blaney has a problem with this, he should consult the person himself. That's not say he has a case anyways, as your name, as long as it isn't being used illicitly, is free for anyone to use. For example, the was a real James Bond, and Ian Flemming simply used his name for a character in his books and movies. The real Bond sent him a letter telling him it wasn't right, and Flemming replied with "Feel free to use my name for anything you wish." Flemming was not in the wrong, because for all intensive purposes, he wasn't portraying the real person. Regardless of this, Blaney cannot complain because, regardless of the fact he's in politics, no one listens to these fools posing as other fools. I still remember the Jessica Alba page on Xanga...
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)
What if there are two Donal Blaneys? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They finally got anonymous coward! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Sued? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Copyright? (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: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!
Re:Sued? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nevertheless, how do you take legal action against people you don't even know what country they're in?
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:Thats about it for me (Score:3, Interesting)
seriously