An Australian court has ruled that a posting on someone's Facebook page can serve as legal notice. I think that this is a bad idea — I've got a lot of accounts hanging around on various social sites that I never check into (Facebook falls into this category). Lots of us do. Some of them don't even let you resign your account automatically, requiring you to send email to a special address, begging to be removed. T
he idea that you can have legal certainty that someone's seen your "I'm about to take away your house unless you object" notice because you stuck it somewhere, where someone has created an account under that person's name (how many of these services ask for ID to verify your identity before setting up the account in your name?) is ridiculous.
It's like serving notice on me by sticking a post-it on a toilet wall on which someone has written "Cory wuz heer" and declaring it legal.
In a ruling that could make legal and internet history, a Supreme Court judge ruled last week lawyers could use the social networking site to serve court notices.
Email and even mobile phone text messages have been used before to serve court notices, but the Canberra lawyers who secured the ruling are claiming service by Facebook as a world first.
Lawyers Meyer Vandenberg, acting for lending company MKM Capital, applied to Master David Harper of the Supreme Court last week to use the popular internet site to serve notice of a judgment on two borrowers who had defaulted on a loan.
Carmel Rita Corbo and Gordon Kingsley Maxwell Poyser failed to keep up the repayments on $150,000 they borrowed from MKM last year to refinance the mortgage on their Kambah townhouse.
Lawyers to serve notices on Facebook
(Thanks, Georgie!)
