Article Image

IPFS News Link • Justice and Judges

A Federal Judge Stops Google From Googling

• bloomberg.com

A federal judge who frowns on litigants Googling personal information on prospective jurors would like lawyers to give up the habit. He's found an unlikely guinea pig for an experiment in barring online searches during jury selection: Google. The search company is scheduled to go to trial on May 9 in a $9 billion case brought by Oracle, which alleges that Google's Android mobile operating software infringed on copyrights for its Java software. With some shrewd tactics, including a threat to make attorneys tell jurors about any online vetting they planned to do, U.S. District Judge William Alsup got both companies to agree to his old-school rules ahead of the trial.

In written exchanges with attorneys, Alsup, a 70-year-old Harvard-trained judge who's overseen the Google-Oracle proceeding since 2010, insisted that the private lives of jurors should be off-limits. "The jury is not a fantasy team composed by consultants, but good citizens commuting from all over our district, willing to serve our country, and willing to bear the burden of deciding a commercial dispute the parties themselves cannot resolve," the judge wrote on March 25. "Their privacy matters." Under the agreement, the companies will refrain from doing any Internet or social media research on prospective or selected jurors for the duration of the trial.


JonesPlantation