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.