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Norwich Pharmacal Order cases

Norwich Pharmacal Order cases involving social media

Norwich Pharmacal Order cases against social media companies have now become fairly common but as technology evolves, many Norwich Pharmacal Order cases still present a challenge or two.

The first Norwich Pharmacal Order cases involving social media

Norwich Pharmacal Order cases challenges

Norwich Pharmacal Order case various companies

The first Norwich Pharmacal Order cases involving social media

The first cases of Norwich Pharmacal Orders against and internet or social media company were recorded in 2011. The first Norwich Pharmacal Order case was successfully applied for by solicitor Yair Cohen. It involved the UK consumer website Money Saving Expert, which was alleged to have been used as a forum for posting defamatory posts against a UK company.

Whilst the website was compelled to provide information pertaining to the suspected users, the case was a test case that had been used to create a new Norwich Pharmacal Order process which is now followed regularly by Yair Cohen and by other law firms across the country. 

Following the first Norwich Pharmacal Order case, other cases followed in the same year, including a Norwich Pharmacal Order against Google and YouTube. In 2012 Yair Cohen was involved in, yet another landmark Norwich Pharmacal Order case, with his then law firm Bains Cohen, where he prepared the first Norwich Pharmacal Order against Facebook. Since then, cases involving Norwich Pharmacal Order applications have become routine with different challenging appearing from time to time.

Norwich Pharmacal Order case challenges

Each Norwich Pharmacal Order case involves many challenges. Over the years, we have learned to overcome most of them and to develop good working relationships with the major social media companies. This makes each Norwich Pharmacal Order case much easier to deal with and it brings a relatively high degree of certainty to our clients in relation to outcomes and what type of disclosure to expect.

The most common challenges with Norwich Pharmacal Order cases are the requests which involve information which would not routinely be provided by social media or internet companies. These cases often involve identification of a social media user by credit card payment details or by other methods which might involves highly sensitive information or information which could be susceptible to fraud.

There are ways around this issue, for example to request very specific information, which forms only part of the payment method or to request alternative information which could be matched and cross referenced with information obtained from other sources. In some cases, the information you might receive following a Norwich Pharmacal Order application in the UK will be different in nature to the information you might receive if you applied for an equivalent of an Norwich Pharmacal Order in the local jurisdiction of the internet or social media company.

Norwich Pharmacal Order cases with various companies

In some cases, your Norwich Pharmacal Order will require a number of different companies to provide information where some of companies are not located in the UK. An example might be defamatory posts on a website, which is hosted on GoDaddy servers and also defamatory videos on YouTube, which is hosted by Google.

If in your Norwich Pharmacal Order case you want to cover both companies at the same time, to save costs and also because you believe that the defamatory statements on both websites are related, you will need to consider the following:

GoDaddy, goes by the law of Arizona, which according to some interpretation would permit disclosure of personal information of internet users only upon an order by an Arizona court.

Google, on the other hand, is located in California where the local law would permit disclosure of personal information upon receipt of a foreign court order but the disclosure would be limited in scope in relation to users who are not subjected to the jurisdiction that granted the order (say England) with the exception of the US. In other words, if a Russian user registered an account with Google, the information Google will be able to disclosure to you, upon receipt of an English Norwich Pharmacal Order, would be incomplete.

A challenge of this nature is common and, sadly, if this is the first time that you lawyer is handling a case with this equation, they are likely to made an error, which could be not only expensive but also has the potential to devastate your entire claim.

One way to address this particular challenge would be to file your initial claim in Arizona, obtain disclosure orders against GoDaddy and Google and then domesticate the disclosure order against Google in California. This might sound complicated but if you know what you are doing and provided you have the right people on the ground, a Norwich Pharmacal Order case such as this is fairly easy to successfully complete.

 

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