Ruling on NightJack author Richard Horton kills blogger anonymity

Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.

In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.

In April Mr Horton was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were unaware that he was using information about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.

His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues.

The officer also criticised and ridiculed “a number of senior politicians” and advised members of the public under police investigation to “complain about every officer . . . show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it”.

Some of the blog’s best-read sections, which on occasion attracted half a million readers a week, were anecdotes about cases on which Mr Horton had worked. The people and places were made anonymous and details changed, but they could still be traced back to real prosecutions.

In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.

The police officer, the judge said, had argued that he should not be exposed because it could put him at risk of disciplinary action for breaching regulations. But Mr Justice Eady criticised that argument as “unattractive to say the least”.

He added: “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.”

He added: “It would seem to be quite legitimate for the public to be told who it was who was choosing to make, in some instances quite serious criticisms of police activities and, if it be the case, that frequent infringements of police discipline regulations were taking place.”

The action arose after Patrick Foster, a Times journalist, identified the NightJack blogger “by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information on the internet,” the judge said.

Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for Mr Horton, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers . . . would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity if someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”. Mr Tomlinson said that Mr Horton wished to remain anonymous and had taken steps to preserve his anonymity.

But Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so or that The Times was under an enforceable obligation to him to maintain that anonymity.

Antony White, QC, for The Times, argued that there was a public interest in non-compliance by a police officer with his obligations under the statutory code governing police behaviour and also with general public law duty on police officers not to reveal information obtained in the course of a police investigation other than for performing his public duties.

Lancashire Constabulary said: “He has been spoken to regarding his professional behaviour and, in line with disciplinary procedures, has been issued with a written warning.”

[the article was originally published at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ece]

Facebook to Begin Mediating Intractable Web Name Disputes

As has been widely noted in the blogosphere this week, Friday night Facebook will begin allowing users to register their own plain-language Facebook domain names, like facebook.com/bits.

Until now, Facebook’s profile pages were delineated by an awkward string of letters and numbers (”http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500019730&”), which isn’t handily printed on business cards and doesn’t play well in search engines like Google.

Anticipating a frenetic land rush for the best names, Facebook says it will assign the new addresses on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting Friday at midnight, Eastern time. It is allowing trademark holders to fill out forms protecting their marks and says it will internally mediate all disputes.

Which may not stop things from getting ugly.

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been in the thick of quarrels over Web site names for more than a decade and has watched companies and lawyers generate waves of lawsuits over coveted URLs. Things became so ugly that in 1999, it began requiring Web site registrants to agree to participate in binding arbitration if any third party asserted a claim over the Web address in question.

Discussing the challenges ahead for Facebook, Tim Cole, Icann’s chief registrar liaison, said that even careful mediation processes will not prevent skirmishes from breaking out, and wondered if Facebook knew what it was getting itself into.

“This sounds like the early days when Network Solutions started doing domain registrations, and they didn’t anticipate the nature of the trademark issues that started arising and weren’t prepared for the flurry of lawsuits they started receiving,” Mr. Cole said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the same thing happened here.”

The creativity of Facebook users, said Mr. Cole (a member of Facebook himself), should not be underestimated. “When someone registers something like ‘Facebook.com/MicrosoftSucks,’ what happens then?” He added that Facebook itself could come under legal fire by an aggrieved party who is not interested in waiting for a perceived trademark infringement to be resolved.

“Unless they have a really distinctive way to prevent abuses from arising, I have to believe disputes will arise fairly quickly as soon as people start registering names,” he said.

(the article was oringinally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/facebook-to-begin-mediating-intractable-web-name-disputes/)