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Lawyers use anti-piracy company to keep celebrity threesome stories offline

By | Published on Monday 18 April 2016

The Sun

As the celebrity couple who have been trying to keep stories about an extra-marital threesome out of the English newspapers find out whether or not the privacy injunction currently in place will be upheld later today, a legal rep has confirmed that “remarkable efforts” have been made to keep the story off Google and the social networks in the UK.

The Sun On Sunday went to court last week requesting that the injunction barring it from running the story be withdrawn, in part arguing that the claims had been so widely reported on websites outside the UK that the facts of the story were now common knowledge in England anyway, making the limitations on its reporting pointless.

According to Torrentfreak, part of those efforts to stop English readers from seeing the foreign reports on this story have included hiring Web Sheriff, better known as an agency that issues takedown notices on behalf of copyright owners whose content is distributed without licence online. Web Sheriff, it seems, now offers similar services to those seeking to protect their reputations and/or privacy rights online.

Though Torrentfreak says that requests by Web Sheriff to Google that it remove links to reports of its client’s alleged activities, in a bid to stop English readers from seeing them, have – in the main – gone unheeded. This may be because the web giant doesn’t deem itself bound by the UK injunction, or perhaps because it has been assessing Web Sheriff’s takedown requests on copyright grounds which, obviously, would not be met.

As previously reported, lawyers for the celebrity at the heart of the suppressed story argue that their client would be “devastated” if their identity was to be revealed in the English press, while also citing concerns about the impact the revelations would have on the couple’s children.

It’s a classic case of the celebrity’s right to privacy clashing with the newspaper’s right to free speech and – once again – while the celeb’s private life probably is no one else’s business, the whole debacle puts the spotlight on the effectiveness, or not, of privacy injunctions in the internet age.



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