In December of 2008 an Australian court allowed the service of legal papers through Facebook. It looks like the trend has now extended to Twitter.

According to an article in Reuters a UK court has served an injunction to stop a blogger from impersonating a lawyer in the UK. The “tweetist” remains anonymous at this time, which is why the court determined that this was the best venue to reach him or her.

With Facebook you have a significant amount of evidence to indicate that the person that you are intending to serve is the person behind the profile. You may have identifiers such as a picture, a name, known associates…possibly an opinion or two that would give you confidence that you are dealing with the appropriate person.

I’m no lawyer, and an injunction is obviously different than servicing papers; however, in this case the Twitterist is 1) anonymous and 2) impersonating someone. What is to stop the person from setting up another account under a different pseudonym and get up to the same thing? Does the injunction against www.twitter.com/blaneysblarney cover the individual’s actions on all other Twitter accounts or just that one? Will the court then have to issue a second against a different account? Who is to say that the account is not controlled by more than one person, is the injunction written to the person or persons behind the account? Who is the injunction actually against?

I would think that the court or the solicitors might wish to contact Twitter to do some extra research on the account such an IP address that is connected to other Twitter accounts or an email address, etc. At least that might provide an actual person to get mad at rather than just a profile. These are the kinds of situations that keep Internet investigators busy.

I do however applaud the court and the solicitors for thinking outside the box. The changing technologies do require modified approaches and this is an impressive step. It will be interesting to see how the matter is resolved in the end.