ITV.com is the latest company seeming to breach a court order by publishing results of the DNA test of alleged 13-year-old dad Alfie Patten.
The court order came after the Mirror published the results last week. But ITV.com Seems to be breaching it with its
enhanced web-search results (which are automatically supplied by Google), as this screenshot, taken on March 31, reveals.
Screenshot from the ITV.com search page
ITV.com breaching reporting restrictions on Alfie Patten’s DNA test
It shows part of the ITV.com results page if you do a search for Alfie Patten at ITV.com – I’ve blacked out the words that reveal the results of the test.
What the court order says
The court order binds “all companies (whether acting by their directors, employees or agents or in any other way) who know that the order has been made” (and ITV will know as it’s a member of the injunction alert service).
It refers to “results of a DNA test … which, for the avoidance of doubt, is not to be published … after the date of this order”.
Automatic results from Google
ITV search box: enhanced by Google
ITV.com doesn’t cover the DNA test anywhere on its site. But when you do a search at ITV.com, you get a panel with internet-wide results – supplied automatically by Google but part of the ITV page – as well as the results for ITV.com.
These results include foreign news sites NOT bound by the court order – and you can clearly see the results of the test in the headlines and URLs.
The news comes after the revelation that Google News is publishing the results, Walt Disney and Brand Republic were also doing so, and that the reporting restrictions didn’t cover bloggers (or else they did but they weren’t allowed to know this).
Yet another nail in the coffin of the current process of reporting restrictions?
You might also like
- Are Brand Republic and Walt Disney in breach of Alfie Patten court order?
- Alfie Patten: what have we learned about reporting restrictions?
- Super injunctions and Twitter: Alfie Patten, John Terry, [redacted] and [redacted]
- Do blogs make reporting restrictions pointless?
- Twitter and super injunctions: no one need pack their toothbrush
Leave a comment!
