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Court Approves Serving Lawsuit Via Facebook

By Kevin Underhill

div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"PBetter take a close look at all those "friend" requests you've been getting.nbsp; One of them might be a process server./P PThis week,nbsp;an Australian court approved a lawyer's request to serve two defendants with a lawsuit by sending them a message through Facebook.nbsp; Mark McCormack said he had been trying for weeks to serve Gordon Poyser and Carmel Corbo with a foreclosure notice after they defaulted on a home loan.nbsp; Courts have previously approved service by email and even text messages, if a plaintiff can shownbsp;that regularnbsp;measures have not succeeded.nbsp; Having noticed that defendants had Facebook profiles, McCormack persuaded the court to authorize service that way./P PThe order attracted publicity immediately, however, and by the time McCormack's documents were ready to go, the Facebook profiles were no longer public./P PAn Associated Press reporter was able to find Poyser at home (and somehow get him to answer the door).nbsp; He declined to comment, except to say that the couple was despondent about possibly losing their home, and to insist that he had restricted the Facebook pages only because he knew media attention was likely.nbsp; Otherwise, he said, "I'd get every man and his dog having a look."/P PFacebook itself wasnbsp;quite pleased withnbsp;the ruling.nbsp; "We're pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication," the company said, obviously through a trained spokesbot.nbsp; "The ruling is also an interesting indication of the increasing role that Facebook is playing in people's lives."nbsp; Yes indeed --nbsp;oncenbsp;Facebook was merely helping people stay in touch withnbsp;friends, but now it's helping evict people from their homes during thenbsp;Christmas season./P PHappy Holidays, from Facebook!/P PLink: A title="You?ve been served ... on Facebook - Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28255716/from/ET/"MSNBC.com/A/P/div div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/LoweringTheBar?a=f7K5O"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/LoweringTheBar?i=f7K5O" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/LoweringTheBar?a=OSJto"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/LoweringTheBar?i=OSJto" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/LoweringTheBar/~4/489833405" height="1" width="1"/

Full post as published by Lowering the Bar on December 19, 2008 (boomark / email).