Wikileaks in England

A recent article does a good job explaining and analyzing (sorry, analysing) a court decision in England forcing the Guardian to take down documents that exposed Barclays’s (is that the right possessive form?) tax evasion techniques.  The Guardian was also not allowed to link to Wikileaks, which still had the documents posted.

By the way, my Barclays bank account is run out of the Isle of Man because I’m an “international student.”  Which is annoying – the fact that Barclays only had one processing center for thousands and thousands of international students meant that it took almost three months for my full bank account in the UK to be set up.

Getting back to the main point, this has shades of the Bank Julius Baer case from about a year ago, where a US District Court in CA tried to force Wikileaks’s domain registrar to “lock” the domain name.  After about a week, the judge turned around and lifted his injunction.  He admitted he was wrong in his preliminary decision, and also admitted that his attempt to shut down the site really only garnered a lot of publicity.

One more side note:  If I was an IP law professor at Cambridge writing an exam right now that needed a breach of confidence question on it, I would totally write one involving something like the Guardian situation.  Maybe throw in something about what happens when a commentator on an article in a different UK newspaper mentions that the documents can be found on Wikileaks (when the article presumably can’t say it itself).  Just saying…