Mystery Footballer Takes On Twitter

I woke up this morning to Radio Five Live covering the news story of Twitter being taken to court by a mystery footballer.

Now before I go any further I will state I am not a lawyer, so none of what I am about to say is based in legal fact. It is just ramblings and thoughts on the subject and my understanding on how things are.

Right back to this mystery footballer. In the UK our courts have what has been described in our press as a "super injunction". A "super injunction" is a way for the rich and famous to try and protect their privacy. Or as it is really used to stop the press from reporting the indiscretions of the rich and famous, such as having affairs.
How does a "super injunction" help them do this? Well basically it's a gagging order that stops the press in the UK from reporting those indiscretions to the public. And here is the super part it also stops the reporting that they are not allowed report on the story.
So once a "super injunction" has been granted nothing can be reported. Pretty cool hey? Now the reason I said that this was for the rich and famous is that it costs a lot of money to do this, so it is definitely out of reach of normal people to get.
Let's get back to this footballer. Now it got out that a footballer (who like Lord Voldemont in Harry Potter can't be named because of a "super injunction") got a "super injunction" to stop the reporting of an affair that he had.
Sadly for this footballer his name got out and was reported on Twitter by users there. Which brings us to the story hitting the UK press front pages of lawyers acting on behalf of this mystery footballer taking Twitter to court in the UK to get the details of those users naming the footballer.
Which is weird. Because Twitter is firstly a company based in San Francisco in the US of A. So isn't answerable to the UK courts. Which means that those lawyers should be going to the US courts to get the user details. Secondly because this is UK law, the US courts could rightly decide that this is a UK issue and deny the request and say Twitter doesn't have to hand the details over.
I think what we can take for granted is that Twitter will stand up and refuse to hand the details over (Twitter have a track record of defending their user details), and force the footballers lawyers to go to the US courts.
Now when the Digital Economy Bill was being passed I thought there was clauses that allowed the UK Government to block websites. What I can't remember if this was linked just to sites pirating stuff or it could be any site for any reason the UK minister decided. So it is possible for the courts to ask the UK minister that has the power to block sites to get Twitter blocked in the UK for breaking UK law.
Could you imagine that, UK Twitter users blocked from using Twitter. How big an out roar would there be? It would be a brave Government that did this.
But I hope this flight of fancy happens, because it would show Joe public in the UK just how bad the Digital Economy Bill is, and would put pressure on the Government to reform it.
However as I stated at the start these are just ramblings on a tech subject in the news today that I know nothing about. What I do know is that we have far more entertainment value to come from this story, and lots of inaccurate reporting in the UK press on the tech issues.


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