Newzbin2, an illegal file-sharing and download website that BT was ordered to block access to in October 2011, has been in the news regularly in the last year or so. Now it has been revealed that the barrister who represented Newzbin during part of the High Court trial in 2010 was, in fact, the 100% owner of the shares in the company. David Harris, who practised in Brighton, was struck off by the Bar Standards Board for “professional misconduct”, both in representing his privately owned company in court and for abusive messages (such as calling members of the legal profession “slimebags”) that he posted on the social networking website Twitter under the pseudonym “Geeklawyer”. This brought the profession into “disrepute” and “diminished public confidence in the legal profession”. Mr Harris was struck off and fined £2,500.