HalloweenJack
remind me again how you sue an anonymous poster from nigeria??
While it makes an entertaining notion that a footballer may have the intellectual capacity of a ripe tomato and actually try to do that …. it isn't (apparently) what's going on.
The action against Twitter (and it's far from a foregone conclusion that it'll be successful) is apparently an action taken in US jurisdiction to force Twitter to disclose some limited user information, presumably, to perhaps allow action against that nasty Nigerian, if indeed, a Nigerian would actually care that much about UK super-injunctions. More likely, it would seem, is that the user behind the Twitter leaks is UK-based, and if so, and if he/she isn't smart enough to have taken steps to anonymise their identity even from Twitter (which, in itself, isn't exactly rocket science to do), then it's getting towards time they can start filling their Calvin Kleins with poop, because if they are identified and UK-resident, then it's a fair bet they'll find the fuzz feeling their collar over contempt of court, and an extremely well-off footballer nailing their hide to the wall in a civil court.
And if, of course, that “anonymous” twitter user were to prove to be a member of staff of a UK newspaper that's currently mouthing off with their objections to super-injunctions, then management at that newspaper could end up with their collars being felt, because the courts are NOT going to be amused of it transpires some smart-ar…. alec journalist did an end-run around due process. Let's face it, the judges are peeved enough that a Lord used Parliamentary privilege (on what seems to me to be fairly thin grounds) to assert “national interest” to out Fred Goodwin. And of course, petty politics and a large portion of populist banker-bashing had
nothing whatever to do with it. ;) :rolleyes:
So imagine what they'll do if they find someone they can nail over breaching one of these things.
I'll tell you what's always puzzled me, though. If the idea of a super-injunction is that not only can the press not publish what the injunction is factually about but can't even publish that there is an injunction, how are we supposed to know what's been injuncted?
I mean, we don't know how many there are, when they were taken out or who they are about. So as a journalist, if I want to write a story about that well-known Premier league footballer, (*) Peregrine Wafflefeather BigTrousers, who is knocking off his teammate's wife, how the hell am I supposed to know there's an injunction to break?
So, to be just in any sense, it has to injunct
specific publications, who must then be told they've been injuncted, and by whom, or they wont know who they can' write about. And, presumably, it has to be more than that Mr BigTrousers (“Waff” to his mates) has issued an injunction, and that all mention of him is prohibited, or the newspapers couldn't report that he scored the winning goal in Saturday's leading match. And that would tell pretty much the entire country that Waff had an injunction out, if we know there's a goal, and we all saw it happen, but the newspapers pretend it didn't.
So the papers (and TV, etc) must know what they can't report on. So now, if papers or TV stations didn't know that Waff was knocking off someone he shouldn't be, the injunction has just told them. And if you don't want to risk a paper or TV station you aren't aware has the story publishing it, then you've got to strike pre-emptively with the injunction and tell the nation's entire media what and who they can't write about.
What beggars belief is that people think that this will actually hold in the long term. How long before some pee'd of journalist that is in the know drops an informal nod to a mate at a newspaper in Berlin, or Tokyo, or Seoul, or Karachi, or all of them, and 3 dozen others?
Gordy nailed it …. the Streisand effect.
Once judges work out that they can't actually do much about Twitter et. al., super-injunctions are all but dead. Welcome to the 21st Century, where the little man can stick it to the wealthy, in this way at least, and there isn't much even the wealthy can do about it. :D
(*) All characters in this post are fictitious and any resemblance to resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. :D
PS. I seem to remember the US government trying to get user details out of Twitter over some Wikileaks stuff, so far unsuccessfully. I wonder what this footballer, sorry … “Waff”, will do if the Twitter action fails? Invade California?
