Greenpeace Twitter injunction backfires for Cairn Energy
Hundreds of people broke the court order on behalf of the environment group, who were told to retract photos
A Scottish oil company's attempt to stop Greenpeace activists tweeting about a protest and posting pictures of people dressed as polar bears on the internet has backfired with hundreds of people around the world breaking the injunction on behalf of the environment group.
Cairn Energy, the company now exploring for oil and gas off the coast of Greenland, was granted an interim injunction on Monday after 17 people, some dressed as polar bears, entered their Edinburgh headquarters and staged a sit-in, demanding a copy of the company's oil spill response plan to drilling in the Arctic.
The Scottish court order prohibits the environment group "disseminating, printing, uploading, sharing, copying or otherwise publishing any images, photographs, pictures or other material (or copies thereof) taken or recorded by Greenpeace activists present within 50 Lothian Road, Edinburgh on or around 18 July 2011."
A Greenpeace spokesman said: "We have had to delete certain tweets. The injunction says 'any images or material taken inside Cairn's offices has to be deleted'. That means all blogposts and tweets done during the protest have to come down and any pictures sent out by us removed. We have had to warn picture desks around the world."
But hundreds of people have begun posting the pictures on their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The attempt to prevent Greenpeace using social media to report the protest has echoes of the Ryan Giggs affair, when thousands of people broke a super injunction. Cairn's wide-ranging order is believed to be the first time that any group has been told to retract posts and photographs.
Greenpeace on Tuesday claimed it was being gagged. "Cairn Energy is using its legal muscle to try and gag us from telling the truth about their dangerous oil drilling in the fragile Arctic environment," said Greenpeace's executive director, John Sauven. "The company is clearly worried that our volunteers may have got their hands on their secret Arctic spill response documents and now they are determined to continue their cover up by any means they can – even if that means impinging on important freedoms of expression."
"Cairn's bosses can use their expensive lawyers to try and shut down our peaceful protests using chilling legal manoeuvres, but we will continue to campaign to protect the Arctic from reckless corporations who see the melting of the polar ice as a business opportunity."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/20/greenpeace-twitter-injunction-cairn