October 2, 2009

Court Order Served Via Twitter!


Is this really legal? In England this week a court sent out a legal injunction...via a twitter tweet!

Apparently this person is impersonating a well known British blogger, but because they are anonymous the court decided has no other way of ordering him to cease and desist than sending a message to the twitter account itself.

Experts worry this sets a dubious precedent of being able to send legal notices through twitter, and one must admit this seems like an iffy idea at best. Generally a public figure can simply contact twitter directly to handle impersonators, so I'm not sure why this blogger took the circuitous legal route. And then perhaps his impersonator, if he's really doing it for satirical purposes as seems to be the case, can simply change his name to "fake_version_of_that_guy_who_sued_me" and keep on tweeting.

Court Order Served Via Twitter!

reuters

Britain's High Court ordered its first injunction via Twitter on Thursday, saying the social website and micro-blogging service was the best way to reach an anonymous Tweeter who had been impersonating someone. Solicitors Griffin Law sought the injunction against the micro-blog page www.twitter.com/blaneysblarney arguing it was impersonating right-wing blogger Donal Blaney, the owner of Griffin Law.

Court Order Served Via Twitter!

Posted at October 2, 2009 3:29 AM
Comments

LOL! The legal system is a bunch of dumbass's or at least in England. You don't need to tweet a court order to the user. Hell that user could be 500 people using that same exact account. Why not contact Twitter and have them pull the logs of the IP address of the user logging in and out of the account or would that be too much work?

Posted by: Brandon D at October 2, 2009 7:43 PM

First it's through Twitter. Later it will be through MySpace, Facebook, and our emails.

How can the court even be sure that the message was delivered? For all they know, it could be floating out there in cyberspace somewhere as 'undelivered'!!

Just one more proof of stupidity existing in our court systems! Contacting Twitter would have been the smarter move. It's a good thing that only 'educated' people are judges. Otherwise, the missive might have been sent to 'Joke of the Day'.

Maybe everyone will now need a Twitter account in order to find out if they're being sued, evicted, or divorced...:)

Posted by: Muriel at October 3, 2009 12:20 AM

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)