> Can we sue Google when they do things like this? No single entity should wield this much power.
Of course you can. This is America and anybody can sue anybody for anything (with few exceptions).
Winning the suit is another matter. Unless you have smoking-gun evidence of discrimination or some such, I'd say the case would be DOA.
Of course, the costs of the suit would likely be prohibitive as well. I don't think that many lawyers would take a case like this on contingency. Maybe pro bono.
You can sue any person (any legal person, which includes both natural persons -- individual human beings -- and juridical persons like corporations, states, etc.)
> So, what happens if Google wins?
Well, what Google is asking for (and thus, what they would get in a complete win) is specified in the Prayer for Relief beginning on page 32 of the complaint [1].
> What happens if they lose?
Essentially, they'd be in the same position they were before the suit.
Theoretically no but practically yes. Even if they know they are in the wrong and would loose a court case, they still "win" by just dragging it out and making you go broke on legal fees.
Yes. That's also what I said above when I said "Google can sue them". It's not illegal is my entire point. You can sue anyone, for any reason, at any time, and even win. That doesn't make something illegal.
If Google sends them a C&D, and expressly forbids them from doing this activity, and implements technical measures to prevent them from doing so, and they continue doing so then they may start approaching the area of illegal (Craigslist v. 3Taps would agree, hiQ v. LinkedIn would disagree).
> Our lawsuit targets bad actors who set up dozens of Google accounts and used them to submit thousands of bogus copyright claims against their competitors. These fraudulent claims resulted in removal of over 100,000 businesses’ websites, costing them millions of dollars and thousands of hours in lost employee time.
So Google needs to remove the sites first, likely to be legally compliant themselves, hurt the businesses in question, then sue to be able to re-instate the websites that they knew shouldn't have been taken down in the first place?
This actually got me wondering if Google has ever sued someone in the same manner and it does not appear as if they have. I find that very interesting - does anyone have any links to the contrary?
Well, that really depends on the case and jurisdiction, I can't answer that for you. Really, the key part is to force Google to actually provide reasoning for their actions, as they eventually did in the case I edited in links for.
> Do Google's lawyers have some sort of Google Lawsuit search engine to find the relevant cases?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Google is dogfooding some kind of as-yet-internal-only tool of this kind, but most lawyers (and law students) have very powerful legal search tools (which are not at all cheap, because they involve not just algorithmic search -- though they include that -- but also quite a lot of expert human curation) for this purpose.
> If they don't, Google gets to decide if they put the material back up.
No they don't. If Google decides not to sue (which frankly seems likely given the precedent it risks setting), then they have to put the material back up.
Which is a not unreasonable assumption. It doesn't take much before Google's cost outstrip the cost of settlement, and even if it were to prevail in court it probably wouldn't recover costs
> Without that happening, you are looking at years before getting a result, thousands of dollars of attorney fees and a high likelihood that if they lost they would appeal.
Yes, it will take time if the other side doesn't settle, that's rather the norm in lawsuits. But its reasonably likely there is a contingency fee arrangement in olace, meaning the lawyers get paid with and out of any settlement or judgement.
> This might be more of an emotional lawsuit than a logical one
That's always possible, but you haven't really done much to argue for it being likely.
> Google harms me in some way. I sue them. They throw an army of lawyers at the case. It takes years. Google wins, case dismissed. I should be on the hook for their legal fees?
That's a separate issue from whether the loser pays: even with automatic loser pays (or in the situations where the loser pays even in the American system) limitations to “reasonable” costs (or actual specific legislated caps) are possible.
>> But that assumes that Google would settle.
>Which is a not unreasonable assumption
Not sure about Google, but companies like Walmart never settle. For them it's better to have the lawyers tell you "Oh, you're going after Wally, well, that's going to be the next 10 years of your life wasted", then it is to worry about the per litigation costs.
Can you cite any cases of this? Google suing people first is very rare.
reply