Well, this is going to be interesting. But I don’t see how it can end well:
Twitter Inc. and some of its users were sued by an entity known as “CTB” in London, according to a court filing.
While the document gave no details, CTB are the initials used by the court in a separate lawsuit to refer to an athlete who won an anonymity order banning the media from publishing stories about his alleged affair with a reality-television star.
What next? And how on earth is a successful suit supposed to be enforced? You might as well try and prevent people from talking to one another in the pub. Or, perhaps, try and hold a publican responsible for conversations that take place on his premises. Right? Over to our Learned Friends for comment…The Twitter suit was filed May 18 at the High Court in London according to court records, and named as defendants the San Francisco-based company and “persons unknown responsible for the publication of information on the Twitter accounts” listed in confidential court documents.
Alternatively, it’s an attempt to make Twitter reveal the identities of its users. This too seems tricky, not least because Twitter is essentially an electronic noticeboard and many of its posters do so using pseudonymns.
*Or instigates some kind of legal proceeding, at any rate.
UPDATE: This Guardian article offers useful background.
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