Slashdot Mirror
UK Court Order Served Over Twitter, To Anonymous User Posing As Another
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."
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?
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?
Actually, "Anonymous coward" is exactly the term the real Blarney actually used on his blog, 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.".
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 from a woman claiming her name was trademarked (decision here, full details and all case files here). 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.
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!
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"