At 08:39 AM 05/20/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>At 10:59 AM -0400 5/20/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>>Neither, actually. They claim that I'm acting "in concert" with
>>justicefiles.org by quoting three lines from the site. And, Kirkland
>>claims, that means I'm bound by the court's injunction against
>>justicefiles.org.
>
>So, is the Google site acting "in concert" with justicefiles?
No, because there's no intention or even scienter involved in Google's caching
of the justicefiles.org documents.
The judge could try to order them to delete their archives of the files,
but can't bust them for their robots creating them in the first place.
By contrast, Declan, as a journalist and news editor,
was explicitly picking out the controversial bits,
and knew about the court order. So there's a question about whether
the court order would apply to Declan in the same way that it would
apply to a friend of the gag-order-ees saying
"sure, I'll post them for you, since you can't any more",
or whether he's acting independently (so the judge could also
order him not to publish the information, but the original order
doesn't apply to him), or whether he's a public-serving
journalist reporting on the cops' attempts to cover up
their activities and evade the public scrutiny and
potential for lawsuits, or whether he's a member of the
Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy* of Liberal Media who are
nonetheless protected by the technicalities of the First Amendment,
except when court orders can convince their editors to fold,
or whether he's a Witness that the miscreants in Kirkland
are trying to intimidate.
I suspect a letter from the DA would easily enough get
Google to roll over - most ISPs tend to do that,
though a few are willing to pay the legal expenses for resisting,
and it's worth a first attempt on the miscreants' part
to send a threatening letter to see which category
Declan and his ISPs are in. They've got their initial response :-),
and since Declan is implicitly a customer of Blacknet,
it's tough to effectively stamp out the data.
----
* After all, it's now the Bush Administration...
