technoculture203-09

I saw an article last week about (possibly) the first High Court order that was issued through Twitter. It is very similar to a case that I wrote about a few weeks ago concerning the blogger who made defamatory comments about a model, and where Google was forced to reveal the identity of the said blogger. In this case, someone had set up a fake twitter page impersonating Donal Blaney, a prominent right wing blogger and lawyer. A High court order was subsequently issued via twitter to demand the anonymous poster to reaveal their identity and stop posting with the name of Donal Blaney, because he was breaching the copyright and passing off as Mr Blaney. This not only raises issues about privacy and intellectual property online but it also calls into question the boundaries between technology and culture and law since it is very hard to define what consists as "real" law online. Most countries have only recently accomdated for such things, although they have been focussing on music and film piracy for a while now. However, this is a clear example of them catching up with new forms of technology and media. It also gives a good example where technology is effectively used to bypass a sometimes very slow and expensive traditional law process, by directly contacting the person via their page rather than resorting to ISPs releasing information about them.