

Google Claims It Can't Be Sued In UK Courts - fraqed
http://searchengineland.com/with-amazing-chutzpah-google-claims-it-cant-be-sued-in-uk-courts-170041

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magicalist
If this is amazing chutzpah, then everyone has it. It's bog standard to claim
that complainants don't have standing to sue.

This is what happens when you try to impose narrative on arguments in court
filings. They aren't like regular arguments.

You could just as easily write the next story on if Google is so confident
that they can't be sued in the UK, why are they making all these other
arguments about why the complainants are wrong? It really undermines their
argument if they have to take multiple approaches to it!

Edit: if anyone can find the actual filing, please link it. I'm happy to eat
crow if I'm wrong :) I found coverage of this in the telegraph as well, but
they also don't link to the actual submission to the court.

~~~
fraqed
Additional information on this case and links to filings can be found at
[http://www.googlelawsuit.co.uk/news](http://www.googlelawsuit.co.uk/news)

~~~
magicalist
I see only a press release by the group suing (and I mean that in the literal
sense, not the judgemental one; the latest post is a copy of their latest
press release), no link to the filing.

~~~
fraqed
The second post (The case against Google - Court Documents) has links, to the
court documents on Scribd or direct PDF downloads
[http://www.googlelawsuit.co.uk/google-lawsuit-legal-
papers](http://www.googlelawsuit.co.uk/google-lawsuit-legal-papers).

With respect to Google's filing perhaps the documents have not yet been made
public by the court.

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kstrauser
Good for them. While I consider UK to be a sane country, I don't want US
companies to be subject to the whims of local little kangaroo courts. Perhaps
they should be subject to billion dollar fines for not having Robert Mugabe's
picture on their home page when viewed by Zimbabwean residents?

It's not my intent to compare UK to Zimbabwe, but to illustrate that holding
local companies to foreign standards is kind of insane. Let's turn that
around: you can bet that some UK companies are violating the US's insane IP
laws. Should American companies be able to sue them for doing things that are
legal in their own home country?

I'm not remotely a Google fanboy, but fair is fair. They're subject to US
laws, but I don't think Google US should be liable for every regulation
everywhere.

~~~
rgbrenner
Seriously? You're saying that Google, a company with offices in Manchester and
London, should be able to operate in the UK, but be completely immune from
their laws?!(!!!)

~~~
Houshalter
Well then they aren't a purely American company, or at least they could be
considered doing business there. I don't think OP knew that.

If Google did exactly the same thing to the exact same people from those
countries, but without having offices in the UK, it would have been fine?

It's interesting that doing business in a country makes you liable to that
country's laws, even for things that happen half way across the world on a web
server. Though they very likely do have servers in the UK so that doesn't
apply here.

The internet is a weird place for the concept of "where" something happened.

Though it would be nice if they could provide servers around the world and
operate their street cars without making the entire company liable to every
single government's laws.

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toyg
I'd be very surprised to learn that this argument was never brought forward
before this case.

I'd be even more surprised to learn that any judge ever went along with it as
presented. You do business in the UK, you better obey UK laws. Google is not
(yet) a State entity granted diplomatic immunity or enjoying some other
special arrangement, so the judge will likely laugh in their face.

This said, I can see why Google would try to pull a fast one: there is now a
real risk that they'll be sued in every single country with a half-decent
privacy law, and some of them won't have a £500K penalty limit. As much as
they can, they have to try and claim that the US settlement covers all users,
including non-US ones. It's the only alternative to a long list of expensive
settlements across Europe.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _You do business in the UK, you better obey UK laws_

Those laws include contract laws, which allow parties to agree on where to
settle any disputes. Such clauses are very common.

Open any T&C, any EULA, any developer agreement, any copyright assignment.
Scroll to near the bottom. You will probably find such a clause.

~~~
toyg
Disputes about the contract, yeah. Disputes about parties' conduct which would
include a breach of law, no.

E.g. if you and me sign a contract stating you'll kill somebody for me with a
sledgehammer, and you kill him with a chainsaw, an argument regarding the
weapon mismatch will be resolved in whichever jurisdiction we specified in the
actual contract, but arguments about the, ahem, nature of the activity will
follow different rules (ok this is criminal rather than civil law, but i
believe the reasoning is the same.)

~~~
jacques_chester
Such a dispute would not be heard in any court, because it's not a contract.

That is, the Common Law does not recognise _as_ a contract agreements with
illegal objectives.

I'd be amazed, truly amazed, if this weren't true of every common law
jurisdiction.

Civil wrongs are less clear-cut, because what constitutes a civil wrong is
heavily dependent on local statues. That's part of why most Giganticorp Inc.
contracts include clauses about settlement venues.

~~~
toyg
I was obviously exaggerating to illustrate the point, but I think we agree
that, if one's conduct is breaking civil law in a country, a contract clause
alone won't be enough to get him out of trouble.

------
cromwellian
Isn't this the Like/+1 case where Mobile Safari settings disabled actually
useful internet behavior (that is, Broke the Web for federated login
services), and so Google, Facebook, and app developers with federated login
needs devised a workaround by exploiting Safari behavior? IIRC, the workaround
however 'leaked' due to a browser bug (which Google themselves submitted a fix
to WebKit for) which causes other cookies to bypass the filter. Google also
stopped doing it, and removed all the cookies that had been set.

So what do the people pushing this suit want to happen? The loophole got
closed (IIRC, the webkit fix by Google happened prior to the WSJ story
exposing the loophole, it's just that Apple doesn't update its browser that
frequently), the cookies were removed, the behavior has stopped.

There is still the need for federated, secure, login, whether it is cookies or
some other mechanism, it is a problem that has to be solved, I worry
government interference can actually inhibit progress here.

And why isn't Apple included in the case? Shouldn't they be suing for a faulty
implementation as well? If someone sells a door lock that doesn't really work,
and your house gets robbed, the robber gets charged, but you can bring a civil
case against the lock manufacturer too. After all, even if Google's behavior
is changed, there are lots of other blackhats who can leverage bugs, so going
after a single exploit isn't actually solving the problem, the single point of
failure was the Safari implementation. <conspiracy theory time> I'm somewhat
skeptical that this is an organic case. I mean, I do think people have a right
to have their day in court if they think they were actually harmed by this,
but could it be that Microsoft's byzantine array of "attack Google"
organizations is behind this case? I have a nagging suspicion.

~~~
jacques_chester
The EULA of Safari specifically disclaims warranties and fitness-for-purpose
to the limits of law (section 7).

Further, it would be pretty hard to get damages when no money has changed
hands and actual economic loss is basically impossible to calculate.

Meanwhile, the _presence_ of the door lock, even if faulty, clearly signals
your intention that nobody enter without permission. Even a rope across a
driveway can signal an unwillingness to receive visitors; anyone who gets past
it is a trespasser, committing a civil wrong and probably a crime.

That's roughly analogous to Google's position: sure the mechanism had a bug.
But the intention of the mechanism is pretty obvious and arguing that unless a
lock is perfect you can do as you please with other people's property isn't
going to be a very scalable law.

TINLA, IANAL.

~~~
cromwellian
But I don't think the intent of the lock in this case is to make federated
services impossible to use properly. Clearly, the purpose of the lock in this
case was to prevent third party tracking cookies. The problem is, there's no
technological way to segment cookies used for authentication from cookies used
for tracking in this way.

The Web has an authentication problem. Existing solutions have tried to work
around it by leveraging browser features not originally designed for the
purpose. The result is privacy snafus like this.

Google, Facebook, et al, would argue that they have platforms, and networks of
sites, with a real need for this functionality, whose basic goal is not to
invade privacy, but to improve enduser UX when using their services.

~~~
jacques_chester
That it is inconvenient _not_ to abuse a bug is not an argument in its favour.
It might be inconvenient _not_ to trespass. Too bad, it's still trespass.

I agree with the problem of authentication; I actually have a patent
application in covering a solution to a tangential authentication problem.

I tried for several years to do it all with cookies and javascript; my
eventual conclusion was that it can't really be done securely. So the
generalised design I submitted depends on piggybacking on extensible command
channels -- HTTP headers, in this particular case.

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alan_cx
Um, call me ignorant of the facts, but don't US courts tend to award higher
damages than UK courts?

~~~
kintamanimatt
Yes, because punitive damages aren't a thing in the UK.

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epo
I knew a British lawyer who went to work for Google in the UK, I wonder what
he spends his time doing?

Perhaps Google expects to invoke UK law when it is convenient for them but not
otherwise. If so, they should be slapped down hard.

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alextingle
Google desperately needs to be brought to heel.

