What you do with the results is a legal argument after the fact. It's like saying we give you food, but you can't store the poop. Honestly - there is a house of cards just waiting to be challenged. Then again .. this is Google ($$$)
Would you trust Google to decide based on some unwritten standard? Why, when we have courts for that? Going to court short-circuits this process and prevents Google from destroying records.
If you go into a proceeding like this, you can expect Google to smear you worse than you ever imagined. I'm not defending this practice, but that's what they'll do.
Not sure if I'm more amazed that Oracle thought deleting the evidence from their website would stop non other than Google from finding it. Or if I'm more amazed that it actually worked for so long.
How exactly does this effect the current state of the trial? When will Google have an opportunity to show this, and on what context? I thought we were just waiting for the judge to finish making up his mind and give his verdict. Is that correct?
I don't understand how it can possibly be the case that google doesn't have to produce data under a valid court order because, well, they don't feel like it. If the data is in google's possession -- which it is -- then google needs to produce it. I understand this is not necessarily great for google's businesses abroad... but it remains ludicrous for a US corp to tell a US court to piss off.
It's going to be an interesting case because it can easily be argued that Google captured nothing; they ran post-capture analysis on data captured by individuals for private use.
Whether that's relevant to the law is what the courts will have to decide.
The problem is that regardless of whether they are or not, getting to a point where a judge looks it over is a process most can’t go through with an opponent like Google.
You're right and it makes sense but how is someone like Google supposed to handle these requests case by case? Or are they supposed to hire an army of lawyers and send thousands of requests to be decided by the courts?
What I find surprising is that Google is exposing themselves voluntarily to subpoenas [1]. The more info Google collects, the more courts will try to use Google records as evidence. Therefore, isn't it in Google's interest to collect and store only the exact info they need, expiring records ASAP so there's as little as possible for courts to collect?
Perhaps Google has factored that risk into their calculations and they have decided that in the current legal environment, the money they earn by storing everything outweighs the money they lose by complying with subpoenas.
There's no law in the US that prevents Google from delisting a search result. Google essentially asked a US court to make something up so they could defy the order. I don't really feel that lies in the area of compliance with the order.
How can you be so sure about the outcome of a jury trial when the investigation hasn't even reached the point of a specific allegation, let alone one that Google wants to defend at trial?
My thought is that it's not up to Google or any company to be the judge and jury... if the statements are defamatory then the plaintiff should go to an elected judge and have their accuser brought to justice, and the judge can wield the power of the state to demand search engines and other publishers remove those results. I think you would agree that simply removing the search results in the short term doesn't bring the wrongdoers to justice at all. Perhaps this is an indictment of the slow movement of the justice system for cases like this.
It is surprising that Google did not push the court to appoint a third party discovery firm to handle the device imaging process and to provide a report to the court.
Maybe both parties' intense desire for privacy in this matter has driven Google to this strategy.
The seeming ludicrousness of the result - Alsup's "go try again, harder this time" - is not caused by this case's parties playing badly. It is caused by poorly defined and understood laws surrounding what constitutes a defensible search. Data handling in this stage of legal proceedings is imperfect, and can be manipulated by both parties to drive up the cost of litigation, or to strategically avoid disclosing the key breadcrumb documentation that would otherwise have led to the smoking gun(s).
one of the things the court can issue as a sanction is that the opposing party can tell the jury "we don't know what information Google has because they deleted it, violating the court's order" the damage to your case in the eyes of the jury they're can be pretty damaging
What did Google expect of this? Did they think they would fight this guy, and suddenly he would give up writing about this case?
I feel like they got a pyrrhic victory here.If your customer is getting his answers in the form of evidence at a hearing, you're doing something wrong, regardless of whether or not he was actually in violation of the terms of use.
Anyway, thanks for adding this. It's good to read how it all ended up.
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