p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- You could call Facebook a bit of a failure from the point of view of its owners, who wanted it to be a online advertising cash machine.

But it is a raging success with its members who use it to talk to each other, pass messages, organise campaigns and have fun online, widely ignoring the many and various advertising hooks.

Now, however it may have taken on a distinctly ominous mein.

In what appears to be a first in Australia, and perhaps the world, a tech-savvy Oz judge has ruled Facebook can be used to served court documents on a defendant, says The Sydney Morning Herald, going on:

“A default judgement is given by the court where the defendant does not appear in court to defend the case. Once the plaintiff has been awarded the default judgement by the court, the plaintiff must then locate the defendant and serve the judgement on them.”

Defendants often find out about this when a process server turns up on their doorstep, or they receive a nasty snail-mail letter — unless they’ve managed to vanish into the sunset.

Then, service can be, “difficult,” observes the SMH.

In the recent Sonny Bill Williams (right) and NRL matter, “the court made an order for ’substituted service’ by allowing certain court documents to be served on Sonny Bill by text message to his mobile phone,” says the story.

“But Facebook is a new one.”

Sydney Morning Herald – Australian court serves documents via Facebook, December 12, 2008

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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