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(1) The Supreme Court of India issued a landmark decision regarding the constitutionality of several provisions included in the Indian Information Technology Act ("IT Act"). The provisions dealt with content removal online and blocking orders. According to the Supreme Court, vague standards for blocking and removing content online are unconstitutional. Additionally, content blocking must be mandated only by a reasoned order from a judicial, administrative or governmental body and must be transparent. (2) The case was brought before the Supreme Court by two young ladies arrested by the police for posting on a social networking site critical comments about a city shutdown. Actually, one of these two young women just reinforced the original comment by "liking" it. (3) First, the Indian Supreme Court struck down provisions...

(1) Twitter International Company was ordered to disclose data about the source of tweets about a whistleblower. The tweets, which included allegations of insurance fraud, are alleged to be defamatory. The whistleblower has brought a defamation action against the poster of the tweets, and asked the court to require Twitter to turn over information that would allow the whistleblower to identify the poster. (2) The Court order Twitter to turn over the poster’s name. The Court also issued an injunction to prohibit the destruction of any evidence or records related to the tweets.

The plaintiff claimed he had been defamed on the website www.rate-your-solicitor.com. He successfully sought interlocutory orders under s.33 of the Defamation Act 2009 against certain defendants prohibiting publication of the defamatory statements. The court noted that, since the arrival of the internet, judicial hesitation in granting interlocutory orders of this type should be eased. One of the defendants was the host of the website, Dotster, located in the USA. Dotster had not made an appearance in the case and the court made a final order in default of appearance.

The plaintiff had wrongly been identified as the taxi fare evader shown in a video posted on various websites. The judgment primarily concerns the issue of whether the plaintiff could be named on newspaper websites reporting the court case and the court ordered that he could be named. The court noted that it had earlier granted interim orders that social media sites such as YouTube and Google should remove the video and provide the identities of web users who had defamed the plaintiff. The orders regarding identities of web users were granted applying the UK tort case of Norwich Pharmacal v Customs & Excise 1973 UKHL 6. According to media reports, there have been further developments in this case in 2013 and 2014.

Betfair was a gambling site which also operated internet forums (chatrooms) where users could discuss sports events and other issues. The plaintiffs alleged defamation by forum users. As a preliminary issue, Betfair successfully relied on the hosting defence in the E-Commerce Directive as implemented by the 2003 Regulations. The court found that the gambling exception to the Directive and Regulations did not apply as the forums were not directly connected to the gambling part of the site.