Intellectual Property Law

There was an interesting "zeitgeist-type" report on the BBC's news site the other day concerning a successful court action for damages against someone who maliciously created a false profile on Facebook.  The article sets ot the main facts quite succinctly, but in essence someone was found to have created a false profile calculated to inflict damage on the target party.  The court awarded the victim GBP22,000.

For me, the point here is that yet again, we have the courts applying mainstream law to activities in cyberspace.  In other words, there are plenty of laws out there that can get you if you (a) behave as though the internet is a lawless frontier and (b) assume that as long as that's where you operate, you're immune.  Not so.

Before we all get too excited though, there are a couple of caveats to be borne in mind (we're lawyers -what else would you expect?)

(1)  The victim here appears to have possessed determination and funds in at least equal measure - according to te report, he seems to have needed plenty of both to track the culprit down and make his claim. Just how he did this is not yet clear.

(2)  There is no information about what if any measures his attacker used to conceal his identity or otherwise cover his tracks - the report sounds a word of caution as to how difficult it could be for others to follow the injured party's example.

Still, let's not be too pessimistic - every victory of this type is significant.