High Court in Britain Serves Injunction Using Twitter

The High Court in Britain has for the first time served an injunction to an unknown person, using the social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter.

When the owner of the BlaneysBlarney account next logs on to Twitter they will, as the Telegraph reports, quoting Andre Walker of the law firm Griffin Law, receive a message telling them to "stop posting, to remove previous posts and to identify themselves to the High Court via a web link form". Griffin Law is very much at the center of the case that has been dealt with by the High Court. The firm's owner Donal Blaney who is being impersonated by the writer of BlaneysBlarney . According to PC World, which reports that a court in Australia once served some form of proceedings over the social networking site Facebook, the anonymous blogger has been impersonating Mr Blaney to the extent of having his photo on the blog, linking to past blog posts from Mr Blaney, and writing in a very similar manner. Mr Blaney is described as a prominent right-wing blogger. His previous activities include involvement with the political Internet-based broadcaster 18 Doughty Street and the youth movement of the Conservative Party, Conservative Future, has spoken of how the serving of the injunction "will make it harder for people who are abusing the Internet and abusing the cowardly cloak of anonymity to harass and bully people". As PCPro confirms assuming the identity of another person or an organization does violate Twitter's terms of service and Tweeters can ask Twitter to deal with such violations. But Mr Blaney chose court action because he said he was aware Twitter took as long as a week to remove accounts that were in breach of the terms of service. His reluctance to use Twitter to deal with the problem also stemmed from the fact that you can only contact the service via email; there is no public phone line that can be used to lodge complaints. If the recipient of the injunction fails to respond to the court Mr Blaney has two options available to him. One is to obtain a penal notice from the court warning that the impersonator could be held in contempt of court by not revealing their identity. Those notices should be served in person and serving one over Twitter may not be permitted by a judge. Alternatively Mr Blaney could issue proceedings against San Francisco-based Twitter forcing it to disclose the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the computer on which the spurious blog is being posted. From there a request can be made to the ISP (Internet service provider) to make known the identity of the blogger or the location of the computer. However Mr Blaney says the issuing of proceedings against Twitter and the subsequent work still required is "slow and expensive". Dr Konstantinos Komaitis, from the law faculty at Strathclyde University in Glasgow has offered his opinion on the matter, saying:

I think this is a landmark decision to issue a writ via Twitter. You are creating a precedent that people will be able to refer to. It only takes one litigant to open the path for others to follow. The law tends to be quite cumbersome and slow, so to have a court deliberate on something like Twitter - so hot, so relevant - it shows quite impressive engagement

The Telegraph says that Twitter offers a service to its high profile users whereby their Tweets are authenticated by a "seal of approval" on their official account page. Britney Spears and Harry Potter author JK Rowling are amongst the well-known names who have been impersonated on Twitter.