Oh, hai! Remember me? I used to write about very important internet law developments on the internet. I still do it on occasion, but now I do it (/checks date) 5 months after they happen apparently. I also promised myself I would write at least 3 posts in 2021. It’s a low bar. I am running out of time. Let’s get to it!
Hey, I have now hit double figures in the number of posts about the right to be forgotten! That might be a record around here. I’m too lazy to check. But a case from the past week has got me writing, so it must be important? Let’s find out!
Hello! Let’s try something new today – me talking out of my ass. Shut up, my other posts are not me talking out of my ass. They are a combination of me recapping an important court decision or newsworthy item AND me talking out of my ass. This post will just be that second part. Fun! But there is some context, lemme explain.
Don’t worry, I don’t understand the headline either. But I’ll explain. There was a HUGE development in privacy / internet circles [/checks calendar] about 3 weeks ago, that will possibly have some HUGE implications for a lot of things. Am I being vague? Seems like it! OK, let’s figure this out.
Sure, everyone is talking about Facebook this month (and last month, and probably many months before that, who knows, I barely pay attention to this stuff), but did you know Google is having its own issues in April, but in the courts? Let me lexplain what’s happened.
Oh Office of the Privacy Commissioner you scamp! Look what you’ve gone and done now.
In July of 2014, I wrote a post that was entitled This hugely important Google case will be going on for a while…. Well it’s more than 3 years later, and it’s still going on. I am psychic!
There was a huge, huge, huge (no really it was huge) internet law case that came out of the Federal Court about a month ago. “If it was so huge, why are you only writing about it now?” you are asking me. Shut up is why.
My two loyal readers may remember the case of Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Google Inc. OK, even I admit I had trouble remembering it, since I wrote about it almost a year ago and a year is forever in internet time. But it sounded vaguely familiar, so I Googled myself (ha!). And what I found was that I was quite prescient, for the title of that post was “This hugely important Google case will be going on for a while…” Well I got that right! I wrote in that post that “I still think the Court of Appeal will overturn the order in the end”. Well about 10 days ago the BC Court of Appeal decision came down and I got that… less right.
Within 14 days of the date of this judgment, Google Inc. is to cease indexing or referencing in search results on its internet search engines the websites contained in Schedule A…
– Supreme Court of British Columbia
I would not blame you if you thought that order above was from the Google Right to be Forgotten case. It is not. It is from Canada. And it will be seriously precedent-setting. Well, if the appeals don’t gut it first. We’re a long way from this being over, but we’ve had two important decisions so far, the most recent one last week, so I guess I better chronicle them so when we end up in the Supreme Court of Canada in three years, I can just refer back to this post because I’m lazy. Let’s dive in.
Sometimes we forget things. Sometimes, we’d like to forget things. You know, like that time I you had a few too many and got naked on the bar and everyone had their iPhones pointed at me you and well, I’ve said too much already. I’d You’d like to forget that incident, but the internet never forgets. And Google never forgets. But thanks to a ruling from a couple of weeks ago that can only be described as “landmark” from the top court in the EU, the Court of Justice, Google kind of has to. Let’s dive in.
I am a lawyer specializing in internet law working out of Montreal, though sometimes I do it in front of the U.S. Capitol. That should tell you what you need to know about internet law in Canada. I also warp young legal minds at the Faculty of Law at McGill.
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