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Identities of Anonymous Internet Posters at Stake in U.K. Cases
A U.K. court has ordered the operator of a website for Sheffield Wednesday Football Club fans to disclose the identities of certain individuals who posted allegedly defamatory messages about the club’s owners and management. The claim was brought by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd, its directors and chief executive officer against the owner and operator of the website www.owlstalk.co.uk. The website requires users to register by providing an email address and password and to agree not to knowingly post false or defamatory material. The court refused to order disclosure of the identities of certain individuals whose postings the court considered were little more than abusive or were plainly intended as jokes, and restricted the disclosure order to postings which it considered alleged greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour, for which the court found that the claimants’ right to protect their reputations outweighed the right of the authors to maintain anonymity.
In another recent U.K. case, a businessman admitted, just before he was due to be cross-examined, that he was responsible for an online smear campaign against a competitor. An article in the Guardian states that the postings went to considerable lengths to hide the identity of their authors, but lawyers for the other side amassed circumstantial evidence that the defendant was behind the website.
For a copy of the decision, visit:
Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd. et al. v. Neil Hargreaves