A British court has ordered a site to reveal the names of anonymous commenters who criticized a football club.
The judge ordered that three fans whose postings might “reasonably be understood to allege greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour”, should be unmasked. Their right to maintain their anonymity and express themselves freely was outweighed by the directors’ entitlement to take action to protect their reputation, he said.
Court orders obliging websites to disclose the identity of users posting anonymous defamatory remarks began in 2001.
Dominic Bray, of K&L Gates, Sheffield Wednesday’s solicitors, said: “There seem to be quite a lot of websites that are using their anonymity to make comments about people and think that there shouldn’t be any liability for it. But the internet is no different to any other place of publication, and if somebody is making defamatory comments about people then they should be held responsible for it. What these cases do is just confirm that’s the law – the law applies to the internet as much as it does to anything else.”
