Live blog: How Twitter is changing the legal landscape

V3.co.uk is at the London School of Economics (LSE) to hear from a distinguished panel of speakers on the issue of super-injunctions and the effect Twitter is having on the legal landscape.

Joining chair Jo Ganville, editor of Index on Censorship, is Max Mosley, who won a landmark case against the News of the World for an invasion of privacy, Ryan Giggs's lawyer Hugh Tomlinson and Imogen Thomas's lawyer David Price who were at the centre of a huge Twitter furore in the past few months.

Suzanne Moore, a columnist at the Mail on Sunday and The Guardian, adds the journalistic interest from the stage.

We'll be live blogging the event as it unfolds, so sit back and wait for the legal fireworks to fly.

Awed hush in the audience as the guests are introduced. Tomlinson said to represent "CTB" before the chair adds, "which of course is Ryan Giggs".

Mosley speaks first, arguing that you "absolutely have to have injunctions" to have a privacy system that works.

"Once it's on the internet it's very difficult to get it off - no judge can make something private again. So if one accepts the need for privacy, and if it's to have any meaning at all, someone [must] prevent the publisher from making information public," he says.

"This requires either a voluntary system or a system where an injunction is available. I cannot see any problem with an injunction."

Mosley adds that prior notification from newpapers to those about to be affected is vital to help give people the right to privacy.

Price (Imogen Thomas's lawyer) argues that the only way to stop people reading things is the law, but that this is a dangerous system to use. "It's a blunt instrument," he says.

Price continues by maintaining that using the law involves cost and uncertainty around the privacy law, because privacy as a concept is uncertain as you have to apply intense focus to the facts so that no-one can predict the outcome.

Tomlinson (Ryan Giggs's lawyer) argues that injunctions are a necessary evil to protect people's privacy, and that only when genuine public interest can be evoked should publication take precedent over privacy - financial wrongdoings, unsuitability of people for public office, deceiving the public, for example, he says.

Moore says that people want to bring down celebrities so they want to expose injunctions, and that people feel they have a right to publish without retribution online.

She adds that judges seem to feel they have no need to learn about Twitter but that people in charge cannot choose to not know how Twitter works. "Incredible arrogance" displayed by those in power towards social networking, she says.

Mosley says that we have to decide who we want to determine the law - judges or tabloid editors. He makes it clear that judges are preferable to editors, and claims that papers are akin to "criminal enterprises".

He suggests that papers should face heavy fines for invasions of privacy but says this still means that the story is in the public and so those affected are still outed.

Lots of audience questions now, some very odd and long-winded but little revelations at present.

So, the evening winds up with some odd questions: "Should phone hacking be legal?", for example, underlining that the legal situation caused by Twitter with super-injunctions is not going to be solved quickly.

28 Jun 2011