ONLINE BLACKMAIL RULING A VICTORY, BUT AT WHAT COST?

In 2013, people who had appeared before Canadian courts started getting a nasty surprise.

When their names were plugged into search engines, sensitive personal details from their court files jumped to the top of the results.

Maybe they were HIV-positive. Maybe they had worked in the sex trade. Maybe they had gone through a custody battle and would prefer sparing their children the messy details.

With the arrival of online publication, Canadian courts had been careful to publish decisions so they were not searchable by Google.

But in 2013, a Romanian man saw an opportunity for profit. He downloaded decisions en masse, indexed them so they would appear in Google results and then charged people if they wanted to remove embarrassing personal information from his site, Globe24h.com.

In a recent ruling, Canada’s Federal Court came down hard against the Romanian site and its owner, Sebastian Radulescu, concluding he was “running a profit-making scheme to exploit the online publication of Canadian court and tribunal decisions containing personal information.”

Justice Richard Mosley ordered Radulescu to stop publishing personal information from Canadian decisions and to pay $5,000 in damages to the complainant who brought the action.

But while the Jan. 30 ruling has been greeted as a victory for privacy rights, there are concerns the decision signals a move away from the principle of open courts.

Colin Lachance, an Ottawa lawyer and CEO of the legal publisher Compass.law, said he is worried one bad actor in Romania could lead courts to curtail what they make available online.

It has long been held that open courts are necessary to build public confidence in the system. Court records are public, but before the Internet, people had to visit a courthouse to consult them. Now, the Canadian Legal Information Institute provides free online access to databases containing thousands of decisions.