
Twitter sued for ‘breaking’ UK super injunction. Oh yes. - ankimal
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/05/20/twitter-sued-for-breaking-uk-super-injunction-oh-yes/
======
steve19
I 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
In 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.

~~~
yalurker
As 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.

~~~
DavidAdams
I'm also a US-native, and didn't take it as an attempt to offend. I used to
live in South America, where people tend to get a little prickly about the US
having laid claim to the term "American." They always call people from the US
"Estadounidense," literally, UnitedStatsian.

It's really our own fault: we have a country that has an extremely awkward
name. We're the United States of America, so "America" is, grammatically
speaking, the name of our country, but we're also part of a set of continents
that's also called "America." We could actually use a better term like
Unitedstatsians or USAians.

~~~
zephjc
I've heard about that about people from South America before, but it doesn't
make much sense to me - the USA is the only country with "America" in its
name. Every other use is for the names of continents, which have no actual
political meaning (except maybe the EU, but not even all of Europe belongs to
the EU, and how many Europeans refer to themselves as that before referring to
themselves as a member of their country?)

~~~
saranagati
well at least we're claiming to be the "united states of" america. those
damned australians aren't even trying to be polite about it, claiming the
entire continent themselves. those poor new zealanders can't even use the name
of their continent to describe where they're from for fear people thinking
they're from the country australia. instead they have to resort to being
called the sheep fuckers of australia because that sounds better than being
australian.

~~~
AgentConundrum
I had never considered upon which continent New Zealand is considered to
reside before reading your comment. After consulting Wikipedia, I've
discovered that the answer is a lot less straight-forward than I had
originally thought.

Before doing my (minimal) research, I would have assumed they were part of
Asia, if for no other reason than that I considered Australia the continent
and Australia the country to be essentially one and the same (i.e. a continent
consisting of just one country), but that doesn't seem to be the case.

According to Wikipedia's article on the continent of Australia [1], "New
Zealand is not on the same continental shelf and so is not part of the
continent of Australia but is part of the submerged continent Zealandia.
Zealandia and Australia together are part of the wider region known as Oceania
or Australasia."

Similarly, Wikipedia's "list of sovereign states and dependent territories by
continent" page [2], does not use "Australia" as a continental group, and
instead uses "Oceania" to encapsulate states in that region.

So I guess New Zealanders don't really have any right to complain about not
being able to call themselves Australian, since they're not even technically
part of the Australian continent. They could refer to themselves as Oceanians,
Australasians, or even Polynesians [3], but not as Australians.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_%28continent%29>

[2] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_continent)

[3] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oceanias_Regions.png>

------
gmac
Wow. 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
You 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
Years ago Circle (<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.

------
corin_
Someone 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.

------
thehodge
<http://www.heyryangiggs.com/> \- I see the Streisand effect is in full force

~~~
cstross
Well _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-
anatom...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/20/trafigura-anatomy-
super-injunction)

------
lorax
If 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
You 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_.

~~~
hahainternet
I am pretty sure that the press are allowed to know about the injunctions,
they're just not allowed to _report_ on them.

~~~
cstross
What 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.

~~~
seabee
> We don't know that republishing the information is in contempt of court

It's clearly not, since republishing information (in this case, a statement
from an MP using parliamentary privilege) is how we knew about Trafigura and
other issues covered by a superinjunction.

------
antihero
The 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.

------
Sidnicious
Could this be said Twitter account?

<http://twitter.com/#!/InjunctionSuper>

~~~
seabee
It could be, but according to some sources very familiar with superinjunctions
(Private Eye) apparently they were all BS.

------
weego
The 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
Would 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
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13477811> It is about half way down that
you get the clarification

------
estel
Also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568192>

------
lukejduncan
Does Twitter have any obligations to UK law? Are they incorporated there
somehow?

~~~
fun2have
It looks like it [http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/24/twitter-starts-hiring-
sa...](http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/24/twitter-starts-hiring-sales-people-
in-london-but-remains-coy-about-euro-hq/)

But I wonder if they will start getting cold feet about having an office in
London now.

------
Tycho
A 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.

------
joshfinnie
This 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
It's not Twitter, it's the internet in general, Twitter's just exacerbated the
effect.

------
RexRollman
It will be interesting to see how useful this action is if the people tweeting
about this aren't even UK citizens.

~~~
VladRussian
i'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
Or more likely, decide against visiting the UK.

