Long distance legal wrangling. No real surprise.
EUROPEAN low-cost airline Ryanair has obtained an urgent court order in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria to force Telkom’s mobile arm, 8ta, to help trace a person it accuses of harming its reputation on the internet.
Judge Francis Legodi ordered the fixed-line telecommunications operator on Tuesday to furnish the Irish airline with all information in its possession that identified or would help Ryanair identify an internet user using the pseudonym "alwaysflying" and an IP address in South Africa.
Ryanair company secretary Juliusz Komorek said in an affidavit it was Europe’s only ultra-low cost airline, had 57 operational bases across European airports and carried more than 80-million passengers a year.
He said the airline had an unblemished reputation for safety in the past 29 years, while it maintained cost-effective flight operations in Europe and North Africa.
Mr Komorek said the airline became aware last September of several "defamatory and other derogatory statements" published about it on the websites PPRuNe.org.
The acronym refers to the "Professional Pilots Rumour Network", according to the website, where popular aviation topics are posted and discussed.
Ryanair said the website was subscribed to globally by pilots, journalists and other professionals, with more than 370,000 registered users, communicating through an average of 2,000 posts per day. It received nearly a million visitors a month.
Mr Komorek said the airline had instructed the Los Angeles-based law firm Holland & Knight LLP to file libel proceedings against a number of unidentified defendants — suing them as "John Does (1-100) — in the Los Angeles Superior Court.
Holland & Knight was also instructed to seek and obtain a subpoena against Internet Brands, the California-registered owner of the PPRuNe website, to establish the real names of the defendants.
On receipt of data, further subpoenas were obtained against parties such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.
Ryanair appointed a specialist consultancy company, Word to the Wise, to analyse the information received, and the company was able to identify from which IP addresses the posts were made. The addresses included two Irish companies, BT in the UK and 8ta in South Africa.
Its investigation revealed the user "alwaysflying" had made 20 posts about Ryanair on the website.
Mr Komorek described one post as "particularly offensive and damaging" as it "falsely portrayed Ryanair to the general public as having incompetent flying crew", which could seriously affect the airline’s reputation and business.
The comment, which was posted under the headline "Poor airmanship", read: "I don’t care if its wind/delays/weather or anything, if you are flying around your destination eating into your alternate fuel then you shouldn’t be a pilot. If they were employed at my company I would have fired the lot of them!"
Mr Komorek said the airline had already obtained high court orders in Ireland and had launched a similar application in Australia.
Ryanair launched the South African court application after Telkom at first failed to respond to its requests but later said its code of conduct relating to the confidentiality of clients precluded it from furnishing the information.
"The applicant (Ryanair) is concerned that it has suffered and will suffer reputational harm as a result of the posting," Mr Komorek said. "(It) has no objection to honest, objective, legitimate comment, but in the present circumstances stands to suffer increasing reputational damage as long as such wrongful publication remains on the website.
"Once in possession of the information, the applicant proposes requesting the user to take down the posting and to tender a public apology for the publication of any unlawful and wrongful statements."
British newspaper The Independent reported last month that Ryanair had dismissed one of its pilots, John Goss, for questioning the airline’s safety records in a television interview.
Mr Goss accused the airline of encouraging crews to minimise the amount of back-up fuel.
The newspaper said the airline had threatened to take legal action against Mr Goss for his "defamatory contributions" to the programme.