Saturday, January 28, 2012
A student falsely accused of taxi fare evasion in an internet video is to seek High Court permission to bring a contempt of court action against YouTube after the clip was put up again on the web.
Eoin McKeogh, aged 22, a DCU student, is also to seek leave of the court to have attachment and committal to prison proceedings brought against YouTube’s chief executive, Salar Kamangar, over his company’s alleged failure to obey an order not to republish the allegedly defamatory material.
Mr McKeogh obtained injunctions against YouTube, Google, Facebook and other sites and usernames to prevent republication of video that shows several people leaving a taxi without paying the fare.
He unsuccessfully brought an action to prevent six newspapers from naming him following reports of a court hearing in which the injunctions against the internet firms was extended.
However, since the ruling by Mr Justice Michael Peart last weekend in favour of the newspapers, online material about Mr McKeogh had only then started reporting his innocence of fare evasion, his counsel, Pauline Walley said yesterday. The judge said he was satisfied Mr McKeogh was completely innocent.
Ms Walley said there had also been progress in relation to other matters, including identifying one of the "John Doe" usernames that had allegedly edited the video and posted the defamatory comments in relation to Mr McKeogh. Ms Walley said it could be inferred from a letter written by this person that he had posted the material but she was not going to name him because that would be the kind of thing that had been done to her client.
Ms Walley said Yahoo and another website called CrowdGather were to be lauded for removing links to the video and she was seeking to have the injunctions against them vacated, which the judge agreed to.
The judge also agreed to a request from Ms Walley for an order to allow Vodafone to release computer records in relation to information from Facebook, on which a fake profile had been put up but later taken down.
However, Ms Walley said that, as of Saturday, the offending video had again been put up on YouTube, and that she had accessed it herself yesterday morning by simply keying in "Eoin McKeogh".
This was clearly a breach of the court’s earlier order and she would be applying for contempt orders against the company and committal orders against the chief executive.
The primary focus of the action was to get the source material taken down, Ms Walley said.
Rossa Fanning BL, for Facebook, said there was no reason why the temporary injunction against his client should not also be lifted and no reason for litigation at all, given the declaration of Mr McKeogh’s innocence by the judge.
Mr Justice Peart said it was a matter of great concern that the video had been reposted.
He adjourned the case until Feb 9.
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