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Twitter sued for ‘breaking’ UK super injunction. Oh yes.
- estel 15y agoAlso http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568192 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568192
- steve19 15y agoI find it bizarre that the entire UK press can be censored from reporting on something as mundane as a footballer having an affair. Does freedom of the press carry so little weight in the UK? Are you UK citizens not outraged by this?
- ColinWright 15y agoIn the UK it is deemed that people have a right to privacy. This is overturned when it is deemed that information is "in the public interest," but knowing the sordid details of some "celebrity's" affairs is not necessarily deemed important enough. there is a balance to be had between an individual's privacy, and the right to public knowledge. In Europe in general, and in the UK in particular, some reporting in the US is regarded with distaste, encroaching as it does on what the British regard as privacy, all in the name of "freedom of speech." The converse is also true, with USAians being horrified that anyone should claim a right to any kind of privacy once the press decide they are interested in them. I never want to be famous. And FWIW - I'm neither European, nor USAian.
- gmac 15y agoSuper-injunctions are granted on a case-by-case basis, and I believe British privacy law is pretty weak compared to some other EU states', such as France's. UK papers certainly seem to get away with printing a lot of prurient irrelevancies that have no genuine public interest but are obviously damaging to the families of those reported on.
- nate_meurer 15y ago"In Europe in general, and in the UK in particular, some reporting in the US is regarded with distaste, encroaching as it does on what the British regard as privacy, all in the name of "freedom of speech." " Not true in my experience. The brits take second to nobody when it comes to prying into the lives of celebrities. Consider the british tabloid press, whose readers could care less about privacy as a principle. The british red-tops (and nattier dailies as well) enjoy tremendous readership, even though few brits profess to actually trust the journalists. I have heard brits express puzzlement over why we care so much about the personal lives of politicians, which is strikingly ironic, given that the politicians are the ones with the ability to screw us.
- hahainternet 15y agoThere's certainly a market for the juicy details of celebrity life, but this is what makes a strong right to privacy more important.
- jbondeson 15y ago"In the UK it is deemed that people have a right to privacy." I believe the public outcry is more around the fact that this is only available to corporations and the rich as these super-injunctions run over £100k[1] to obtain. [1] This number has been bandied about in many of the articles, but I haven't seen an "authoritative" source on it.
- AndyJPartridge 15y agoIndeed, I have looked myself for a costing. I guess that any disclosure of costs by the court would also disclose who paid said costs, and therefore... Ah, what a calamity. It's interesting that due to pressure some of the CCTV in the UK is now starting to be removed, but if they remove half of it we'll still be the world leaders of it I suspect.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yalurker 15y agoAs an aside, using "USAians" in your writing is probably not what you want here. Intentionally mangling the name of a group/nationality because you don't like the standard naming convention or because you want to get a little jab in to show your distaste for the group just undermines your credibility. If I were to write a valid political commentary but use "Dumbocrats" for Democrats or "Republitards" for Republicans it would be hard to take me seriously, right? When someone online writes "USAians" it's very difficult to regard the rest of their writing as legitimate and not trolling or intentionally smug/antagonistic.
- phpnode 15y agoI'm just guessing, but if he's from Canada he could be described as (North) American and perhaps he wanted to make that distinction. USAian is hardly a slur, it's entirely different from your Dumbocrats/Republitards example.
- yalurker 15y agoI'll reply here though it's more of a general response to all the people who replied. First, I'm not sure why I got so many downvotes, I believe my response was quite civil and appropriate, my intention was to be helpful. Clearly many people here do not view "USAian" as an offensive or derogatory term. I'll try to explain why I believe it to be inappropriate and hope I can do so in a polite and effective enough manner to avoid more downvotes. "USAian" reads to me as someone who, under the guise of disambiguation, is intentionally being diminutive. Very rarely does a situation occur in which "American" as a term for the people from the US actually result in confusion versus the entire continent. It seems most likely that the speaker is using it to intentionally point out the unimportance of the USA to counter an implied American self-importance. You're using a term for a group of people that they would never use for themselves, which is a strong indicator it may not be a desirable label. Further, given common themes in current global culture, it is very easy for the term to be taken as an intentional insult, as if the speaker is "putting them in their place". Whenever I see something like "USAian" I assume the speaker views Americans as self-centered, imperialistic, unworldly or similar and is using the term to intentionally remind the reader of the significance of the rest of the Americas, with the implication they need this reminding. But, based on the responses, maybe I'm an outlier. Hopefully the above clarified my original response.
- TheBurningOr 15y agoGenuine question here. How is the right to privacy circumvented to allow for the CCTV cameras and other policies that seem, to me at least, to be a pretty clear invasion of privacy. Seems to me this policy is more about allowing aristocrats, celebrities and the wealthy to squash stories they don't want published about them.
- ColinWright 15y agoI think the argument is that what you do in public places is public knowledge. If random people legally positioned can see you, then there is no assumption of privacy. I speak from a position of no formal knowledge, merely having derived a working model that seems mostly to predict accurately various things. It's a working theory, not based on actual law. It's also probably got flaws, but I don't really care - I provide this working model merely as a starting point. And regarding the rich being able to circumvent the law, it was ever thus. These days you need vast amounts of money to get into power, and once there, it's unlikely the laws will make life difficult for the rich and powerful.
- rcxdude 15y agoCCTV cameras aren't as large a privacy breach as having something about you published in a paper, since on a CCTV the number of viewers is usually zero or one, and they usually have no interest in you beyond your presence at the location of the CCTV camera at a certain point in time. In fact, I suspect that CCTV footage of, say, someone entering an adult store would fall under the privacy law and would not be legally re-distributable beyond the owner of the store (this is pure speculation though, but it does at least provide an example of how the two apparently conflicting policies could be resolved).
- joelhooks 15y agoThey don't have a Bill of Rights that explicitly grants this "freedom" do they? Apparently they use this to define what they can and can't do as journalists: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199556458/ http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199556458/
- ashleyw 15y agoOn one hand, the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to a private and family life, and on the other, you've got freedom of the press. These two acts obviously contradict each other, and so super injunctions exist to allow a judge to decide if the former has greater precedence than the latter.
- tristanperry 15y agoUK citizen here. Yeah, I'm pretty outraged by it. I mean, we don't have true freedom of expression/speech/reporting over here (hence super injunctions), but it's still crazy how various rich people - mainly overpaid footballers - are having affairs and then bullying their way through the courts to protect their 'privacy'/overexcited lebido.. Plus we've now got the ridiculous situation whereby the person who cheated (in this case, Ryan Giggs..) is protected, whilst the person they cheated with (in this case, Imogen Thomas) is seeing their name dragged through the dirt. It's bizzare to say the least. Thankfully this hopefully won't be as much of an issue in the future however, since a report was released today (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13465286 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13465286) and the general consensus is that injuctions have been awarded too often and in the future they shouldn't be used (as much) for these purposes. Still, it's pretty annoying that rich adulterers are being legally protected..
- pyre 15y ago> , it's pretty annoying that rich adulterers > are being legally protected.. They have the best laws that money can buy...
- seabee 15y agoIf you want to be pragmatic about it, the targets of such celebrity gossip are generally rich. The only people this excludes are the 'human interest' types - perpetrators and victims of some crime or tragedy - and the stories tabloids like to run on those people are better served by libel laws anyway. So really this isn't a big deal.
- pyre 15y agoHow do you then evaluate that (at least in this case), the celebrity that cheated is protected, but the person that that celebrity cheated with is not protected? That doesn't make sense. Due the to high profile of the rich celebrity, the other person's name will also be dragged through the papers (especially if they have been banned from mentioning the celebrity in question). What about that person's 'right to privacy?'
- DisposaBoy 15y agoAt least one of us isn't outraged, and why should I be? The news media goes too far sometimes. It's about time they learn to respect people's privacy, even if it means there's no news!
- eftpotrm 15y agoWhile I'm not particularly defending the situation that's arisen, what public good is served by knowing that a footballer had an affair? Censoring that Trafigura were dumping toxic waste was, I agree, wrong. But revealing that two people are/were sleeping together is just salacious gossip; I can't see who it helps and it certainly doesn't help the families of the individuals concerned.
- qq66 15y agoThe problem is that to implement a policy that distinguishes between the two situations, you have to trust the government to distinguish between a Trafigura and an affair, and even harder to believe, to act appropriately in each situation. My school of thought is that you should trust entities without competition as little as possible.
- corin_ 15y agoSomeone commented on that TC.eu article the names involved, maybe TechCrunch should be sued as well. As a Brit I think I speak for quite a few of us when I say that these super injunctions are quite fun. If an affair like that was reported I probably wouldn't even read the shitty gossip columns that published it, certainly I wouldn't care if I did come across them. As soon as a super injunction comes into play it turns it into a guessing game at first, and a "who will get sued" game second. Much more enjoyable to follow.
- gmac 15y agoWow. Next up: suing the midwives who delivered the miners who dug out the coal that was burned to generate the electricity that powered the factory that manufactured the computer that was used to originate the offending tweet.
- joebadmo 15y agoYou know, I've been thinking about how great it would be to have a decentralized twitter/news system, but I wonder if that would actually make censorship like this easier because you could target users directly, which would be less absurd than targeting companies like Twitter.
- quag 15y agoYears ago Circle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(file_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(file_system)) had a distributed news system call gossip. It pretty much operated as a trust network. You'd pull down gossip from people you knew and republish it (if you chose) along with a trust metric. These days I'd probably go for something RESTful in website form. The trick would be to clearly define the various roles and make it easy for people to slot in and build compatible parts of the network. Then pump in the hype.
- joshfinnie 15y agoThis reminds me about the discussion Canada was having where it is illegal to announce election results until all polls are closed; people were questioning the right to tweet results before all polls were closed. Twitter really changed the game for information distribution and I am surprised that we are now just talking about the ramifications. News entities, countries, people all need to understand the power of Twitter and find ways to fix the current system and not just sue where things are broken.
- mattmanser 15y agoIt's not Twitter, it's the internet in general, Twitter's just exacerbated the effect.
- RexRollman 15y agoIt will be interesting to see how useful this action is if the people tweeting about this aren't even UK citizens.
- VladRussian 15y agoi'm obviously not a lawyer, so my understanding may be utterly wrong. The injunction is covering whole world, though the judge can enforce it only in UK. That seems that if you ever plan on visiting the UK during statute of limitation for injunction violation, you'd think twice before tweeting and most probably decide against it :).
- caf 15y agoOr more likely, decide against visiting the UK.
- thehodge 15y agohttp://www.heyryangiggs.com/ http://www.heyryangiggs.com/ - I see the Streisand effect is in full force
- cstross 15y agoWell that would explain what the fuss is about: if true, it's just tabloid celebrity nonsense. Not like, oh, the Trafigura superinjunction (where exposing the nasty little nest of maggots behind the story was clearly in the public interest): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/20/trafigura-anatomy-super-injunction http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/20/trafigura-anatom...
- lorax 15y agoIf you are in the UK, how do you know which people you aren't allowed to publish stories about? How do you know if a super injunction is in force? Are they published somewhere?
- cstross 15y agoYou don't. That's what makes this whole deal so annoying -- you can accidentally break the law and be liable for imprisonment (contempt of court) or horrendous damages without knowing why.
- rflrob 15y agoPeople above are mentioning how super injunctions violate an American's conception of the right to free speech, but I think this is the more troubling aspect: that it violates the journalist's right to due process. I'll grant that ignorance of the law isn't usually a good defense, but when the law (or in this case, court order) is kept secret, what other defense can you use?
- pyre 15y agoIt's definitely fulfilling someone's Kafka-esque fantasy.
- hahainternet 15y agoI am pretty sure that the press are allowed to know about the injunctions, they're just not allowed to report on them.
- cstross 15y agoWhat about the rest of us -- those of us who aren't newspaper journalists and on whom the injunctions are not served, but who may nevertheless be liable for contempt of court if we tweet or blog about something we read on, say, a foreign web site? We don't know that republishing the information is in contempt of court, but ignorance of the law is not (and never has been) a defense -- at best it's merely a mitigating factor for the court to consider when handing down a sentence.
- weego 15y agoThe news reported earlier that reports that Twitter is being sued are incorrect and that they are just having the user details requested from them. Which will no doubt lead them to a Starbucks on the Old Kent Road, but you have to try!
- mcritz 15y agoWould you please post a link to that report. The article linked to in this HN post is poorly sourced. I'm hoping to read a credible journalistic article on this subject.
- fun2have 15y agohttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13477811 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13477811 It is about half way down that you get the clarification
- fun2have 15y agoMore details here on legal aspects of the UK courts chasing a us company. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8526865/Twitter-could-be-difficult-to-sue-leading-lawyer-warns.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8526865...
- lukejduncan 15y agoDoes Twitter have any obligations to UK law? Are they incorporated there somehow?
- fun2have 15y agoIt looks like it http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/24/twitter-starts-hiring-sales-people-in-london-but-remains-coy-about-euro-hq/ http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/24/twitter-starts-hiring-sa... But I wonder if they will start getting cold feet about having an office in London now.
- Sidnicious 15y agoCould this be said Twitter account? http://twitter.com/#!/InjunctionSuper http://twitter.com/#!/InjunctionSuper
- seabee 15y agoIt could be, but according to some sources very familiar with superinjunctions (Private Eye) apparently they were all BS.
- antihero 15y agoThe brilliant thing about super/hyper injunctions is that you could be breaking them without even knowing it, because you have no idea that they existed. What a complete perversion of the justice system.
- Tycho 15y agoA super-injunction isn't the same as a 'cover-up', it just puts a halt to the media circus. It doesn't provide secrecy, it just stops the tabloids scrambling for all the lurid details and publishing them to their giddy readership for weeks on end, probably ruining a few peoples lives in the process. Which is what usually happens in Britain. Wayne Rooney and John Terry, England's two most accomplished players, have both been the centre of a national debacle that lasted months, all in the last year.