A student, who was falsely accused of dodging a taxi fare in a video and on comments posted on internet sites, is considering bringing proceedings to have YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar arrested and brought to court for contempt of court orders.
Lawyers for 22-year-old Eoin McKeogh, a student at DCU, got a High Court injunction against YouTube, Google, Facebook and a number of other sites and usernames to prevent republication of video that shows a number of young people evading a taxi fare.
The court heard that the video has been reposted on YouTube since Saturday.
Mr McKeogh was wrongly identified as being in the video in comments posted on a number of sites.
He sued Facebook, Google, a number of usernames and a website called Crowd Gather.
His Senior Counsel Pauline Whalley told the High Court matters against most of the defendants had been sorted out.
But Facebook and Google, who also own YouTube, remain defendants in the case.
She said she was seeking a declaration that YouTube were in contempt of the High Court injunctions by allowing the video to be reposted.
She said Mr McKeogh's lawyers had prepared a motion seeking the attachment and committal of Mr Kamangar.
That motion has not yet been issued and Mr Justice Michael Peart said he would not deal with that for the moment.
Ms Whalley said that since Mr Justice Peart had made a ruling about Mr McKeogh's identification in the media, the press coverage and online reporting of the case had started to "create its own wave" and submerge some of the foul and unspeakable material that had been written about Mr McKeogh.
Even though Mr McKeogh lost his application preventing his identification, the judge's ruling made it clear that he was not the young man in the video and he was completely innocent of any allegation made against him. He was in Japan when the video footage was taken.
Lawyers for Facebook said a fake page that had been set up in Mr McKeogh's name had been taken down and there was absolutely no reason for there to be injunctions outstanding against the company.
Rossa Fanning for Facebook said that in circumstances where there had been such a public declaration of innocence of Mr McKeogh, he could not see the purpose of the litigation continuing at all.
Mr Justice Peart said it was obviously a matter of great concern that the video had been reposted.
He adjourned the case until 9 February.
But he said he really urged everyone to ensure that the case does not have to be needlessly argued in court and urged the parties to cooperate to that end.
