On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 09:52 AM, Marc Branchaud wrote:
I wonder: if The Onion were to attempt to pull an article due to a courtSomeone may be sued for the original act, but not for failing to coerce others into disremembering something they witnessed. The principle is that third parties have no obligation to act to undo the acts of others.
order, or some such, and yet the article persisted in various caches
here and there, to what extent could The Onion be charged with not
complying with the order?
(This is my understanding of deep legal principles, though I'm not a lawyer and the law is evolving so rapidly toward fascism that things may have changed completely. If the Red Queen orders the Doormouse to forget the acts of others, what she says is the law.)
See above.
Another angle: If Bay threatened to sue the Onion unless they pulled the
article, would he still have a case against them because of Google's cache?
In practice, Google will remove an item if the submitting party is the one to request the removal. Certain Usenet pests have been active in demanding that posts they dislike be removed, and Google Groups will in fact remove the items (rewrite history) if the submitter fills out a Web form and requests the removal.
There have been no court cases that I am aware of (haven't searched, don't have access to the lawyer engines) where a third party like Google has ever been sued for committing the sin of having remembered a public event and recounting its memories to others.
--Tim May
