[mattmaroon]

Exactly. People fail to understand this all of the time.

I'd be pretty impressed if they got one court to agree that Google was doing something illegal by failing to comply with an order from another court. Courts are understandably loath to castrate each other like that.

[electromagnetic]

Actually, Google basically fought its way to the first hurdle (the point that the court told them to release personal information) and then said 'yeah, sure, whatever' and coughed up the dough. If they were really concerned about privacy, they would have fought it a long way further, or applied for an appeal before releasing the information, however they didn't. I'm sure this could be grounds for a suit.

Their users have a reasonable expectation of privacy and it'll take a court to decide if Google actually made a reasonable attempt to protect her privacy. Google should have offered to delete the blog and ban the user, but apparently they did neither and went through the motions.

I'm not saying this suit is right, but I'm sure there's definitely grounds for this woman's suit. It wouldn't be one court commenting on another courts decision, it would be one court ruling on Google's inaction on taking it further. The whole reason there are appeals and the supreme court is that a just decision can't necessarily be made by just one judge or jury.

[mattmaroon]

Higher courts often find the lower courts wrong, but from what I understand basically never penalize the corporation for following the offending court's orders. It's obvious why, it would set a terrible precedent.

Corporations don't have a responsibility to take every case to the Supreme Court if they have to. If a court orders them to cough up information and they do, there is virtually 0 chance they will ever be penalized for that by another. Can you name one instance?

I'll ask my IP attorney friends about this, but I remember one expressing similar sentiment about mobile phone corporations before.

[run4yourlives]

Again though, that comes back to my original point: Is it the duty of a corporation to question the direction of the court in decisions of law?

In other words, does google have a moral obligation, as defined by the state, to defend your privacy against the state? To what end? The plaintiff in this case seems intent on establishing a precedent that will effectively elevate corporations to be equal to that of government in enforcing legal constructs.

That doesn't seem like a reality I'd really like to see.