June 28th, 2017

Canada Claims Global Jurisdiction Over Internet

I know what you’re thinking, the title of this piece must be a joke, right?

But not according to news reports regarding a decision out of Canada’s Supreme Court. Here’s the lede from the Toronto Star:

Google is barred from displaying anywhere in the world the websites of a company accused of counterfeiting a Canadian technology company’s products, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.

In a 7-2 ruling that has broad implications for freedom of expression, the reach of courts to protect intellectual property and other rights, and for the operations of Internet-based businesses, the country’s top court upheld a sweeping injunction against Google’s ability to display commercial content that was at the heart of a court battle.

The very brief background is a claim that Datalink Technologies Gateways ripped off the technology of Equustek Solutions by relabeling it. A fight ensued, resulting in a Canadian order that Google delist Datalink websites. (Link to the brief order: Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc.) (Copy: Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc.)

That all being Canadian law, I offer no opinion, especially since there’s a much bigger fish to fry.

And that fish is a whale, as the Supreme Court of Canada apparently wrote that Google must delist Datalink not only in Canada, but worldwide.

Let that sink in. A government tells Google to delist worldwide.

The lawyers for the winner think they have a big win:

The ruling is the “first global de-indexing order” and will be “extremely important” worldwide, because it gives a remedy against “gatekeepers” of information such as Google, or Internet service providers, said McCarthy Tetreault lawyer Barry Sookman, who acted for several intervenors representing publishers of literary and musical content.

While the high court apparently thinks that removing sites is only a temporary injunction, for the real issues to be resolved later, the ramifications are, simply stunning.

Because you know who else will think this is “extremely important”? Every tinpot dictator in the world.

I understand Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, often doesn’t like what people write about him. And Vladimir Putin is reputed to have killed journalists.

So ruthless, thin-skinned autocrats that have no free speech in their countries can order Google to delist articles worldwide.

Essentially, Putin could demand that the price of doing business in Russia is for Google to delist any articles in the New York Times and Washington Post dealing with its attempts to interfere with our election.

All he needs is a court order from the courts he controls claiming lèse-majesté — it being defamatory to offend the ruler. Truth is irrelevant.

Again, let that sink in. If Google complies with this order, regardless of whether it is temporary, then the price of doing business worldwide is allowing dictators control what we see on our own screens.

Updated with links from elsewhere:

Canadian Supreme Court Says It’s Fine To Censor The Global Internet; Authoritarians & Hollywood Cheer… (Masnick @ Techdirt)

Global Internet Takedown Orders Come to Canada: Supreme Court Upholds International Removal of Google Search Results (Michael Geist)

Ominous: Canadian Court Orders Google To Remove Search Results Globally (Keller @ Center for Internet and Society)

Top Canadian Court Permits Worldwide Internet Censorship (Mackey and McSherry and Ranieri @Electronic Frontier Foundation)

November 4th, 2015

Does New Gmail Feature Destroy the Attorney-Client Privilege?

If you use Gmail, then Google is reading your email. You may not like that fact, but that is reality. It isn’t private.

And for lawyers privacy is a pretty big deal.

Google announced a new feature yesterday called “Smart Reply” where they read your email and suggest replies for you. No, this isn’t coming from the Onion, this is real.

Here is the “problem” as they see it:

But when you’re checking email on the go, it can be cumbersome and time-consuming to reply to all or even some of them. What if there was a way for your inbox to guess which emails can be answered with a short reply, prepare a few responses on your behalf and present them to you, one tap away?

Well, starting later this week, Inbox will do just that with Smart Reply.

OK, next up, their solution:

Smart Reply suggests up to three responses based on the emails you get. For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing. And for those emails that require a bit more thought, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away.

Ouch.

Google, of course, has long ago admitted to reading your email if you use their service. But they just claim that this is exactly what people expect will happen, and that there is no expectation of privacy. Really.

Now they want to take it one step further, from not only reading your email but answering for you.

Thanks, but no thanks. I’d like my private communications to be just that, private. And by the way, if Google can read your email so easily, so too can the Government. Just sayin.’

(H/T Nicole Black and The Droid Lawyer)

December 23rd, 2014

Will Google Cars Eviscerate the Personal Injury Bar?

Google’s prototype released on December 22, 2014.
Image credit, Google.

I hadn’t given much thought to Google’s self-drive cars until they unveiled a prototype yesterday. They call this vehicle “the first real build of our self-driving vehicle prototype.”

And it occurs to me that these drivable computers will result in both many lawsuits regarding them, and simultaneously eviscerate a significant portion of the personal injury bar.

First off, some of these cars will crash and people will get injured. And you can bet your last dollar that there will be lawsuits and some class actions regarding that, with many fingers pointed Google’s way.

The potential for error in such heavily software-dependent systems is extraordinary when combined with the limitless potential for collisions. There will be new meaning to the idea of computer crashes.

Google is working hard on that problem, having driven its test vehicles 700,000 miles already in the Bay Area to prevent this.

But.

The issue of lawsuits regarding the cars will, I think, be vastly overwhelmed by a huge reduction in collisions that result from the most common forms of human error. Each year about 30,000 people will die in the U.S. from car crashes, and about two million are injured, and that is after considering a significant drop in fatalities from safer cars and seat belts over the prior decades.

Aside from the role that alcohol plays in being a cause of collisions (not accidents), many are the result of a simple failure to stop in time that results in a rear-endng, or sideswipes from changing lanes without looking, or hitting the unseen pedestrian.

The last generation’s distractions of radio-tuning, cigarette lighting, and screaming back-seat kids has now been supplemented with email, texts, phone talk and GPS devices. Calling distracted driving an epidemic seems like a cliché, but if you’ve glanced into the windows of your fellow drivers, which my kids tend to do and point this out to me — “multi-tasking” drivers is another phrase for distracted and inattentive.

And what will those new-fangled cars do? They will see the other cars/pedestrians and slow down or stop despite the driver being lost in thought elsewhere. Or drunk. Or asleep.

With human error crashes reduced by software that automatically stops or slows the car, the number of broken bodies and cars will be reduced. The number of deaths will be reduced. Your insurance premiums will be (theoretically) reduced.

And that means the need for my services as a personal injury attorney will be reduced. (Likewise reduced will be the need for trauma health teams and emergency rooms, not to mention car body shops.)

Has anyone ever cheered being put out of business? I am. Because I drive, too.

I’ve been hit in the rear at least four times in the last few years. Every one no doubt the result of an inattentive driver. Thankfully, all of those were minor and they never resulted in an injury. But my lack of injury is simply my good luck.

This is not to say that there won’t be downsides to driving a Google car, not the least of which is the total abdication of the last vestiges of privacy. Google will know exactly where you are going and how long you have been there, and be more than happy to sell that information to anyone with the Benjamins to spend.

Or give that data to the government when it comes a’ callin’, as the government most surely will.

But from a raw safety standpoint, I am left with no other choice than to cheer the company on. Go ahead, Google, make my day by bringing on safety and putting us personal injury attorneys out of business.

OK, you won’t actually put me out of business because, by the time it becomes a mass market item, I will no doubt be retired.

But if I were fresh out of law school, this isn’t the field into which I would head.

Update 1/14/15: See The Google Car Is A Huge Threat To The Auto Industry (Business Insider)

June 19th, 2014

Amazon’s New Phone, Marketing and Lawyering

So Amazon.com introduced a new phone yesterday. And what does it do? It allows you to point it at some knick-knack you might want to buy and Amazon tells you how much you can buy it for from them.

What is really does, of course, is give yet more information to Amazon and its partners as to your every thought, whim and desire. What does it do for the consumer? Not so much. You can already go to their website, after all, and see what they have.

Here is the problem, which should have been obvious, if it wasn’t already with the big scandal over Edward Snowden and the NSA spying on us: People hate to be spied on.

Google, which started out with a mantra of “Don’t be evil” loves to collect information on you. So too does LinkedIn, which seems to like snooping through your contacts, then using those names to send out spam.

Lawyers should learn from this: Because this is everything you should not do.

Lawyers provide a service; our clients are our mission. When retained, we are supposed to do the job we were hired to do as diligently as possible, not use it as an excuse to find yet more clients. The client comes first.

We’ve seen a few examples in the past, of course. One example was a Chicago criminal defense lawyer using his potential retention by Lindsay Lohan as an excuse to give a press interview. We’ve seen it also with lawyers that place stupid ad damnum clauses in Complaints hoping that they can get their names in the paper.

Except it isn’t about the lawyer. It’s about the client.

So watch Amazon and Google and LinkedIn and learn from them about the stuff you should not be doing.