I side with the court (which is choosing to favour the person who asked for the restraining order).
It's not been proven that Google did send an automated email. The only thing the court does know is that an email was sent, and it was "from" the person who is subject to the restraining order.
If Google did send an automated email (which is unclear), then lawyers should be updating their advice to the subjects of restraining orders to ensure that their contact lists are purged appropriately.
> If Google did send an automated email (which is unclear), then lawyers should be updating their advice to the subjects of restraining orders to ensure that their contact lists are purged appropriately.
so basically you are saying that when something in the law is not clear, it's the job of the lawyers to make it sure they give proper advice to the next person coming into that situation, while the unlucky first person just has to face consequences?
> "so basically you are saying that when something in the law is not clear, it's the job of the lawyers to make it sure they give proper advice to the next person coming into that situation, while the unlucky first person just has to face consequences?"
That is a lawyer's job, yes.
On the other hand, it is also our Constitutional tradition to give the defendant generally the benefit of the doubt on the law (rule of lenity, reasonable doubt, and so forth).
You can't hold someone in violation of a law he or she could not have reasonably foreseen.
The question is where is the line drawn between contacting a person and a third party or script of some sort contacting the same person ostensibly on their behalf.
For another example a person working in telemarketing is usually given a list of numbers to call which are automatically dialed by the phone system so therefor has no direct control over who they "contact".
The usual standard for a court would be the intent of the alleged perpetrator (IANAL etc).
I would think it would be either "intentionally" or "knowingly." In other words if you sent the email intending to contact the other person that's pretty clearly there. I would suspect at least some states would draw the line at "knew or should have known" when you hit send.
But "couldn't reasonably have known" is different. If Google is, for example, looking at your past email contacts and sending invites out on your behalf then that is so far beyond "knew or should have known" that I can't imagine it applying.
If violating a restraining order is a misdemeanor or other crime, which it certainly is if bail is set, then the burden of proof goes the other way at trial (which we aren't at yet).
The state must prove he sent it (probably, I am assuming, knowingly --- I doubt that fat-fingering is enough given due process requirements), and they must prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's not the court's job to favour the person who asked for the restraining order, beyond issuing it in the first place and enforcing it afterwards. Enforcement is a matter of justice, not a matter of taking sides, and if the person accused of breaking the restraining order did not wilfully do so then a punishment would, in my view, be unjust.
Since we're at risk of talking past each other, my context here is that I often seem to receive email from LinkedIn, Twitter, Google etc. reminding me that people those services believe to be my friends have performed some activity or other, and they're just desperate for me to join them. In some cases I barely know these people beyond having had some interaction with them in the past which the social network never manages to forget, or they actually are friends who would be perfectly capable of telling me about the service in question directly and would never spam me in such an obvious way. Ergo I can conclude that these emails do not result from some intentional action on the part of the individuals named in them, even though the social network in question very much wants me to believe that they do (as I am deemed to be more likely to open and respond to the mail if I believe this). A common pattern is to send out mails along the lines of "You haven't spoken to X much recently, they miss you!" in an effort to get you to log in to the network again, which is obviously pretty fucking terrible in the case of a restraining order. There are a bunch of examples of this kind of thing here: http://microformats.org/wiki/social_network_anti-patterns
So, my prior experience would appear to corroborate the version of events given in the OP, viz. social networks sending mails which claim to be from individuals who have no knowledge of the mails themselves. Obviously this creates a nasty legal situation - Google cannot have violated the restraining order because they were never under a restraining order in the first place, but then it seems unjust to say that the alleged violator did so either, because he did not actually send the offending mail or even know of its existence. I suppose the matter hinges on whether or not he could or should have known, and in that case whether he could have done anything about it. It's also problematic in other ways. Say you were to take out a restraining order against me, such that I am no longer allowed to reply to your comments on HN or seek to engage you in any way, and I comply. At some future point HN decides to start sending out spam mails to get people to post more often, and you receive one implying that I, having not spoken to you for some time, wish to engage you in discussion (say, using the conversation we're having right now as evidence of the fact that we've enjoyed interesting discussions in the past). Would that violate the order? My instinct says not, especially as I could never have known the consequences when conducting this conversation, just as I could not know the consequences (viz. spam emails) when adding someone to my Gmail contact list.
I side with the court (which is choosing to favour the person who asked for the restraining order).
It's not been proven that Google did send an automated email. The only thing the court does know is that an email was sent, and it was "from" the person who is subject to the restraining order.
If Google did send an automated email (which is unclear), then lawyers should be updating their advice to the subjects of restraining orders to ensure that their contact lists are purged appropriately.