You (and I) don't know the circumstances that led to the restraining order. There may have been violence, intimidation, harassment, abuse. This may even form part of a consistent pattern of abuse.
The woman in this case may feel so traumatised by any reminder of her ex, or contact from him, that the act of receiving an email from him (on his behalf) may actually be deeply upsetting and disturbing. It may undo any efforts she has put in place to move on with her life, and restore her to the place of being abused.
If a court has put in place a restraining order then there is no acceptable basis for the ex to contact her. Including whether that contact is via an automated email on his behalf.
I'm with the v̶i̶c̶t̶i̶m̶ court on this. Someone is to blame, and the bar isn't too low. I do think that a decision like this will cause Google to evaluate the impact of any automated emails.
I also think that if you get a restraining order against you it's not enough to lazily avoid contact with the other person, you should proactively ensure that you do not contact the other person... so purge your address book if need be, the court has made it your responsibility to not contact the other person.
You can say that the person should have removed the victim from their contacts, but it's not even obvious that they would have known that the victim was on their contact list (basically, anyone you ever email gets added to it), and even if they did know, they would have no particular reason to assume that Google would contact this person automatically.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
For example, if the attacker buys an ad on a newspaper or tv and says something without addressing the victim specifically, is it against the law?
You (and I) don't know the circumstances that led to the restraining order.
... doesn't seem to be very consistent with this:
I'm with the victim on this.
Isn't it possible for a court to issue mutual restraint orders? Or maybe the order is a preventive measure for alledged facts that are still to be evaluated.
We don't know what happened to motivate the order. We know who the victim is here: the guy that got jailed.
Also, I don't think it's very reasonable to expect most users to know how to purge personal information from sites, it's a recurring theme over here.
Keep in mind I find this no contact thing rather weird. Of course I spent most of my adult life in small towns in the US, where such a broad order would be met with "no contact? In a town of 3000 people? Are you saying he has to move out of town?"
I have also known people who were heavily threatened by exes and opted to just disappear for a while. The reason is that if you are really in danger, then the last thing you want is to tell the target of the order where to avoid (because that's where you will be). Due notice (a Constitutional requirement) makes restraining orders useless against someone dangerous enough.
Note that I'm not suggesting that the actual law is being misinterpreted. I'm merely stating my personal views about the existence of such a law.
A restraining order has specific terms that address exactly what conduct it restrains. It may or may not be against any form of contact [1]. So the question is really, is the specific kind of conduct here within what was actually prohibited in the order (a secondary consideration, if it was, might be whether or not it should have been included in the order, but the remedy for that is to appeal the order, not to defy it and expect not to face consequences.)
[1] See, for instance, the the California template domestic violence restraining order, with check-off boxes for standard terms (including #21 -- which is completely free text) that may or may not be imposed in any particular order: http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/dv110.pdf
Then again, I don't live in the USA, and the concept of a restraining order is a bit alien to me since it's not something heard of as much over here. There surely is some cultural bias at play.
I don't think it's too much to ask for courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. Establishment of intent is one of the main things courts exist for.
In America we, the people, go to court to get answers to tough questions. Easy questions we google.
Sufficiently strong-willed people can ignore death threats as "inconsequential, empty bluster." However, this is neither necessarily wise, recommended, or easy, nor does it disqualify such threats as harassment.
While an invite is no death threat, I'd note there's another bar in play here too: The former girlfriend was, if we're to give her the benefit of the doubt, perturbed enough by this invitation to go down to the police station.