bto has an enviable range of experience in dealing with internet and social networking issues:
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Advising a professional who was the victim of an internet campaign spread across some twenty blog sites, Facebook and elsewhere. A husband and wife team had constructed pages of abuse directed at our client including allegations of sexual professional misconduct and misuse of patient medical records. bto obtained interdict orders against the defending parties and shut down the blog sites. bto also obtained Protection from Harassment Orders, believed to be the first time a court has granted these in Scotland solely on the basis of abuse on the internet.
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bto has advised several Housing Associations in relation to postings on Facebook and Bebo. Some of these were by current employees, others by former employees. bto successfully obtained the removal of the offending material.
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bto acted for a coachbuilder company that repaired a luxury car. The car owner was dissatisfied and posted adverse comment on an ‘owners club’ forum website. Three years later, a Google search against the coachbuilder was still showing the same adverse comment as the top-ranking page 1 Google ‘hit’. This required the involvement of Google’s legal department and tracking down the webmaster to Germany.
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bto acted for a company, one of whose staff members, the Chairman’s PA, had been harassed by another staff member, he having become infatuated with her. When rebuffed, the male staff member, an IT worker, created a website which consisted of images of the lady’s head superimposed on other, obscene, images. An interim and then a permanent interdict was obtained in the Court of Session against the person concerned and the website was shut down. When the individual repeated his offending, a breach of interdict case was commenced, however, this was not followed through once satisfactory undertakings were obtained from the offender’s solicitors.
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bto obtained a court order against a household name ISP, forcing them to disclose the identity of the person thought to be responsible for posting defamatory fake “reviews” about a Scottish business, on two American review websites. This was a very serious matter for the Scottish business. Defamation proceedings were then threatened and in the face of this threat the other party agreed to mediation which was successful in resolving the dispute. This case is especially pertinent in the light of the rising prominence and influence of travel review websites such as Tripadvisor. It can be time consuming to monitor and respond to adverse comment.