Twitter Court Reporting “May be Useful” – The Federal Court Speaks

The story I had in Crikey earlier this week about Twitter Court reporting in the AFACT v iiNet case has attracted a lot of interest, even spreading overseas. See here and here to get up to speed on this story.

Today, I have some comment from Federal Court’s chief executive, Warwick Soden.  The irony is that the Federal Court is a lot less conservative about the practice than The Australian has been. As I previously reported, The Oz stopped their reporter, Andrew Colley, from court reporting by Tweet after my first story appeared in Crikey.

But the Federal Court is basically cool about the whole thing.  See Soden’s comments below:

“The practice is relatively new and – as such – the court has not had the opportunity to consider any possible adverse implications.  It is entirely at the discretion of individual judges how they conduct matters in their court room.  We would ,of course ,be concerned if any device was used that disrupted proceedings.

“Nevertheless, on what we know so far, the use of twitter does not seem to have caused any problems and maybe a useful way of informing the public very quickly about what is happening in a court room.  The court itself – through its e-services strategy – supports the use of portable technology.  New portable devices provide a range of functions – in addition to being a phone – and are increasingly used by many in the ordinary course of business because they are so efficient.”