'Poking' Facebook User Led To An Arrest

Via Telegraph.co.uk, a woman was arrested for 'poking' a Facebook user.

Police deemed that 36-year-old Shannon Jackson violated a protection order – similar to a restraining order – by using the site's feature to attract the attention of another user.

The order previously obtained by the woman who received the poke banned Jackson from "telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner".

We blogged about using Facebook to fire an employee, court papers being served by Facebook, court order served over Twitter, and now we write about a violation of a restraining order by using one of the Facebook applications to virtually poke another user. Any thoughts anyone?

Why pay for access to Pacer??

Pacer, Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is a database that provides access to federal court records at a fairly low cost. This article in the New York Times describes the efforts of a non-profit group, Public.Resource.org, to download documents from Pacer during a free trial period and then make those documents available for free to the public. According to the article, one man, Aaron Swartz, managed to download about 20% of the database during the free trial period!

The Pace Law Library has a subscription to Pacer, and Pace Law students and faculty who need federal court documents for their scholarship can contact the reference staff for assistance in locating relevant documents on Pacer. Many of the documents listed in the dockets on Pacer can be downloaded in PDF format. Although we are not allowed to distribute our Pacer password, we can do searches for our patrons, and download the documents they need from the relevant docket.

Court Papers Served By Facebook

On the Legal Blog Watch, an interesting post titled Court Papers Served by Facebook by Carolyn Elefan about serving court papers via one of the biggest social networks Facebook.

Imagine opening your inbox on a social networking site and finding an invitation -- not to connect to an acquaintance -- but to show up in court. That may be the direction that social networking is headed, at least in the aftermath of a case out of Australia, where a judge granted lawyers permission to serve defendants with a default judgment via Facebook.

Do social networks take on yet another role? What are your thoughts on it?