[Gay State Conservative]

I sympathize with the Spaniard. Regular people should not have their lives destroyed by trouble they had sometimes decades ago.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts,and (I suspect) other states as well,has a website that contains every single real estate transaction over a certain period (which varies from county to county).Many of these transactions involve deaths,divorces,bankruptcy filings and criminal and civil lawsuits...which can be seen on the website.One of the many important features of any advanced,civilized society,IMO, is "open records".Politicians,for example,*hate* open records...as do criminals.They hate it for very obvious reasons.Think about it....you'll all understand.

With this particular guy I could see why the record should be deleted if it was inaccurate but otherwise....tough luck,Pedro!

[Dr. Sivana]

One of the many important features of any advanced,civilized society, IMO, is "open records".

Really. I think that such societies tend to have a combination of open and closed, decided at the national or state level and varying from time to time to suit needs.

Lots of records (JFK, for instance) stay closed for a long time and then are opened later. Bankruptcies by law get dropped off of credit reports after a certain amount of time, etc. If the judge ruled on the law as it i written, good on him. If he interpreted the law, and the government of Spain really wants to beat up on Pedro so that Google is not inconvenienced, let them clarify the law.

Google has been a bad player in their shoot first (posting LOTS of scanned copyrighted works) and worrying about the legal consequences later. Some of it, not enough I'm afraid, will stick.

[jiggyboy]

Let’s remember the conditions under which those “open records” rules were written. If I wanted to find out about your real estate history, I had to go down to the court house with your specific information, pore through some microfilm or have somebody do it for me, pay to have it copied, then spend some more money to do with it what I wanted. Now it’s two seconds and free for as many as will fit on your screen. Remember the newspaper that published the addresses of every gun owner in the county? Just that easy.