[DanBC]

Court orders are subject to due process. When you give software permission to access your email contact list, and then permission to send email to everyone on that lost, and you are under a court order that places restrictions on who you are allowed to contact, you don't the get to say "whoops! I didn't realise that all this contacting people stuff might be covered by the don't contact this person court order".

[bluntly_said]

From a purely letter of the law interpretation, you're not wrong (at the moment). What you're missing (and the reason that you seem to have to respond again and again with this type of comment) is that we're in the middle of redefining what the word "contact" means, and that heavily influences the spirit of the law.

When restraining order laws were written, contacting someone took at least a modicum of effort. You had to write a letter, or type an email, or pick up the phone and dial a number, or take the time to travel to visit someone. It was a process that took premeditation. You simply couldn't contact someone with as little as a button press (that may or may not even make it explicitly clear who you're contacting). In fact, the law explicitly has exemptions for contact that was not premeditated, such as running into someone accidentally in public.

However now we've got systems that intentionally place people in contact because it increases revenue for the service running it. They've made it so easy to contact wide swaths of people in a completely impersonal manner that my cat could "contact" people on Facebook by walking across the keyboard.

So the real question people are asking is: does an automated online service sending an email with my name in it to a person constitute contacting that person. I'm not sure it does. By the general attitude in the thread, it seems a lot of people are also hesitant to call that contact.

So sure, you're right about this constituting contact in current law, but what we're seeing is that current law has not kept up with social perceptions of what people think of as contact. This means the law is probably going to change in the next decade or two. Hell, it might even change right now because of this case.

[DanBC]

A judge tells me not to contact X.

I should be hyperaware of anything around "contact" - this includes automatic systems.

There are not many systems that will access your contact list wihtout permission.

There are not many systems that will then send a contact to everyone on that list without permission.

So a person has to take several steps:

1) not remove X's contact details

2) allow access to contact list

2a) allow contact to happen

(2 and 2a are often bundled into on step).

This feels really clear to me. But perhaps we need to give a "single accidental blerate contact exemption" - this allows someone to male a mistake once, but not to abuse the system by joining dozens of networks to send many many requests.

It should be noted that the changing definition of contact isn't particulay new.

Bob is givi g a restraining order, so he starts shopping i. A new part of town. He doesn't know that Ann uas got a job there. He will be thought of as breaking the order until he. An explain that he had no way of knowing that Ann worked there.

[einhverfr]

I would still expect the state to have to prove that he actually sent the invite. They can do this easily enough, issuing a subpoena for a criminal case to Google under the stored communications act or a search warrant under the same act if it is necessary. If Google doesn't have records to show that a link was actually clicked on, or the records don't show that, no violation.