[Foundation-l] Interesting legal action

Thomas Morton morton.thomas at googlemail.com
Fri May 20 23:03:28 UTC 2011


Hmm.

TL;DR version - communicating the contents of an injunction is not
inherently illegal, communicating it to a private mailing list might be
actionable, but highly unlikely, especially if the intent is to help supress
publication of the information in a wider forum.

Ok, now the longer form. What we are talking about here is civil litigation
- so the first thing to clear up is that there is no criminal action
involved in publishing the information. Which means if you do publish the
information in a way the subject feels is in violation it is up to them to
take you to court over it. No police will be knocking on your door :)

So the first point to make there is.. how likely are they to take you to
court over it?

An injunction is a form of legal finding called an "equitable remedy" (we
have articles about all of these things BTW, I just checked) which in this
case widely prohibits people from a certain act (publishing the info). If
you violate the injunction the litigant has to take you to court, which will
then decide if you have broken the injunction and, based on your specific
case, award some form of damages. This may simply be fines, or worse.



More information about the foundation-l mailing list