While Cogair purports to stand for freedom of speech, the National Union of Journalists is worried that it is doing more harm than good - and a legal expert says the group behind it could face criminal proceedings if they were identified.
The NUJ's Irish secretary, Eoin Ronayne, says the union recognises that there are two sometimes conflicting rights: the freedom of expression and the right to one's good name. "Cogair only seems to recognise one right," he says. "Politicians will look at these things and say that's what journalists will do if let free."
Ronayne argues that freedom of expression should take precedence over the right to one's good name, but only if the information being published is true and in the public interest. The lack of regulation on the Internet, he says, can lead to someone's reputation being damaged for no reason.
Despite current libel laws, which Ronayne says have "gone too far", it is unlikely that whoever is behind Cogair could be sued under Irish law. Ray Byrne, a law lecturer in Dublin City University, says the person or persons inputting the data into Cogair could face rarely used criminal libel charges, leading to an injunction.
However, even if this happened, it would probably only prevent them publishing material about the person who brought the injunction. Byrne says a judge could also find the site in contempt of court, since its contents might affect potential jurors. But, he adds, this assumes whoever is behind the site is in the State, and could be identified.
In Cogair's case, while the authors refuse to divulge their identity or location, their email to Computimes appears to originate in a Dublin cybercafe.
Since the Cogair website is hosted in the US it is most unlikely its author(s) could be sued there either, according to Byrne. Under US law a publisher can only be sued for libel if it can be shown there was malice, which is very difficult to prove, he says.
Internet service providers are probably safe too. Under Irish libel laws both the publisher and the distributor can be sued. But Byrne says that even though ISPs download Cogair's pages, "it would be hard to argue that they are distributors under the [1961] Defamation Act".
However he points out that anyone who tells others about material they read on Cogair's site could be committing slander. Emailing the site's material to others could result in the more serious charge of libel. The recent case in Britain where a libel in an internal email cost Norwich Union nearly £500,000 is a salutary reminder that computer networks aren't beyond the reach of the law.