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Twitter Reveals User Details In UK Libel Case
whoever57 writes "In a case that could have implications for the Ryan Giggs affair, Twitter revealed user details in response to a legal action filed in San Mateo county, CA by lawyers representing South Tyneside council. The alleged libel refers to critical comments made via Twitter. It is possible that one of the people making the critical comments is one of the council members."
Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs. Ryan Giggs
My right to free speech is more important than the right to privacy of a public individual being protected by an abusive court order in a completely different jurisdiction. The fact that this is a legally enforceable order handed down by a branch of government makes it a political issue and thus political speech. If a court order was never issued in the first place people would have stopped caring by now.
WTF is with editors these days? First, title of article is totally wrong, because this legislation has NOTHING to do with UK, but with US per se (they had to brought it to US court where there you can still sue for libel, but well you can't do superinjuction woodoo). Article also makes sensationalist claims that this decision helps "That Another Football Player" case - well, it doesn't. This is one, concrete person, who is sued for libel. This is not injunction to stop the spread of information - people who will retweet this person message or information won't be liable for any violation of law as long as they will reference this user and his information accordingly.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Personally I think he should be suing his solicitors for not acting in his best interest. The details of almost every "super" injunction have been released, thanks mainly to parliamentary privilege. Once the injunction was made a lot of people wanted to know who it was, so when his name does get released there was massive coverage. They would have known this, but advising your client to put his hand in the air and say mea culpa means you can't charge quite so much.
Quite frankly I couldn't give a damn about who it was and who he slept with, but some people do. The only reason I can see why is that people like Ryan Giggs actively sell themselves to the public - effectively training people to want to know everything about him - and he derives a handsome income from it. He also appears to sell himself as a family man, so having it made public that he had an affair may affect his earnings. Clearly he couldn't make a choice between keeping his dick in his pants and keeping his name clean.
I don't like these injunction has they can be abused - as seen by Trafigura case.
Freedom of speech does not include the right to slander or libel people you don't like, and it absolutely does not include the right to do so anonymously. You have the right to free speech - but you also must obey the libel laws, and you must be prepared to take the legal consequences of your free speech.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Well it is English people using the Californian court system to sue English people.
Now they have the information they requested from Twitter, they will go back to England and take a similar action against the ISP. Then they will commence libel proceedings against the Twitter account holder; but if the tweets came from a cellphone connection - and twitter has a higher than average proportion of its visits from cellphones, the telco will only be able to say approximately which county the tweet came from, as lots of users share the same public IP address behind a NAT connection. For everyone else, there is the insecure Wifi defence.
This is absurd. Tweeting is like saying something on the street in public.
I am not a lawyer, but I know the difference between libel and slander. I'm not sure you do.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?