Some interesting cases were decided last week.

Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club’s bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.

The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.

In another high court case last week, John Finn, owner of the Sunderland property firm Pallion Housing, admitted just before he was due to be cross-examined that he was responsible for a website hosting a scurrilous internet campaign about a rival housing organisation, Gentoo Group, its employees and owner, Peter Walls.

Exposing the identity of those who post damaging lies in cyberspace is a growth area for libel lawyers.

Dan Tench, of Olswang, the law firm representing Gentoo, said: “This case illustrates an increasingly important legal issue: proving who is responsible for the publication of anonymous material on the internet. This is likely to be a significant issue in defamation cases in the future.”

The website Dadsplace, set up to campaign against perceived injustices in the family courts, had a forum where anonymous postings made various accusations against Gentoo, Mr Walls and his staff.

Those posting the comments went to considerable lengths to hide their identity, and Gentoo’s lawyers ran up a bill estimated to be about £300,000 – which Mr Finn will now have to pick up, along with any damages awarded – taking the case to court and amassing circumstantial evidence that he was behind the website…

Another lucrative line of business for m’learned friends. And a salutary reminder to utopian libertarians that the law has a longer arm than we once supposed.

Curious column by Andrew O’Hagen in the Torygraph. He opens with a meditation on the England rugby team’s piss-up in Paris, which was apparently attended by Princes William and Harry:

Prince Harry – a lager-lout if ever there was one – could talk the hind legs off a donkey and he doesn’t hesitate when some bladdered oaf hands him the vodka bottle.

We know this because we’ve all now seen the pictures from the post-defeat bacchanal that followed the Rugby World Cup final.

There’s Prince William hugging his mates to tell them he loves them; there’s Jonny Wilkinson, drink in hand, with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, diving headlong into temporary oblivion. Some other bloke has lost his top and Prince Harry, ever the scarlet-faced chieftain of the stag party, is ready for a song.

This is called “drowning your sorrows”. It’s called “letting off steam”. It’s called “cheering up the lads”.

But then,

Let us put aside the fact that the same behaviour in Newcastle quickly gets you bundled into the back of a police van, and concentrate instead on the occasional value of binge drinking.

Funny how the spectacle of upper-class vandalism still makes the new modern Torygraph go all dewy-eyed.

I detest Halloween. Here are two reasons why.

Seen in a local Tesco store. Er, shouldn’t that read “this store has agreed to…”?

A newspaper ad.

Of course none of this will stop Tesco commercialising it.