I’m not a big fan of super injunctions, and particularly, if some of the rumours are true, of the way that some of them have been applied. However – I also don’t particularly want to go to prison over a careless tweet, so I thought it might be useful if we had a few guidelines. *(MASSIVE CAVEAT: I’M NOT A LAWYER) These come from a bit of digging around, a chat with some of the team from Taylor Wessing and a brief follow up conversation with the extremely nice and knowledgable @nirishan
THE BAD NEWS
There are a basically 3 problems – 1. If you breach a super injunction you’re in trouble, but this one isn’t too difficult to avoid. Don’t mention any names or in any way identify someone who has a super injunction. “A premiership footballer” is probably alright, “who’s name rhymes with…” is definitely not.
2. If you publish something that aides the breaching of a super injunction, you’re also potentially in trouble. There’s very little case law on which to base this so it’s difficult to be precise but basically it works like this. If you publish something, you have to accept responsibility for what it might reasonably incite people to do. Ie. If you mention the name of a twitter account that is breaching super injunctions, it’s reasonable to expect that your readers might go off, read it, and breach the super injunction themselves. They might then be in trouble and so might you. Practically, I’d suggest this means keeping things general. It’s probably OK to mention that google autocomplete is now breaching super injunctions left, right and center but probably not ok to say what search terms you have to put in to make it do so. So, as a rule of thumb (and depending on the context of your post), don’t specifically mention or link to sites that are breaching the orders if you’re not willing to get in at least a little bit of trouble.
Another example: Rumour has it that somewhere today, the full text of a super injunction got published, I’m pretty sure saying that is OK, I don’t know where it is, and if I did, I’m pretty sure that saying any more would risk aiding / abetting.
3. Libel: The UK is the world’s libel capital – we have a stupid law that says if you are sued for libel it’s your responsibility to prove that what you said is true, not their responsibility to prove that it’s false. Libel and super injunctions aren’t necessarily linked but just be aware that, in breaching a super injunction, you’re not just laying yourself open to contempt of court.
THE GOOD NEWS
Twitter is based in the US, so UK courts don’t have any jurisdiction over it. If the UK court wants to make twitter divulge your personal information then it has to write to America and say please. I think Libel is a bit more complicated but I don’t really understand it.
(there isn’t much good news)
Just to re-iterate this is blogging / twitter advice, not legal advice. People should be able to talk about this without worrying about a tap on their door.
This entry was written by , posted on May 12, 2011 at 6:28 pm, filed under Sam Oakley and tagged blogging, libel, super injunction, superinjunction, twitter. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
To say that I’ve neglected this blog over the last few months is bit like saying… [insert banal yet amusing witicism here].
I could very easily site the long hours at work, or that fact that I’m doing some more political stuff in my spare time as reasons for this but the truth is that I got bored. Well… perhaps boredom is wrong, the French have this word “ennui,” it means more than boredom, it’s boredom and apathy and lethargy and the general sucking of any kind of will right out of whichever poor b*stard gets it. The PR blogosphere just got so far removed from anything that affected my life that it started to feel like one of those interminable dinner parties with friends of a friend, the kind where if you had a gun you’d shoot yourself in the foot just to get invalided out.
Anyway, the blog got pointless so I stopped blogging until I could think of a point. And now I’ve thought of one.
It struck me that I’m now three (and a bit) years into what might be becoming at least a semi-decent career and, having made most of the mistakes possible during those three years, I could blog about how not to make them. So that’s what I’m going to do.
From now on, every post on this blog will be about one of two topics 1:how to get a good job in PR, 2:how to be a good junior PR person. I’m wiping my blogroll clean and splitting it into two lists – firstly, people aspirant PRs should be reading and secondly, a list of student / young PR people who I’d recommend to potential employers.
Obviously blogging and social media will remain a major theme so to kick off, I’m looking for single best student run blog I can find – Philip Young and Richard Bailey any thoughts?
This entry was written by , posted on November 19, 2008 at 5:57 pm, filed under this blog and tagged blogging, Starting out. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.