Insights on Weaver

discovery, electronic communications service, Hotmail, Quon, remote computing service, Stored Communications Act, text, Weaver, webmail

More on the Cloud, Discovery, and the Stored Communications Act

By InfoLawGroup LLP on December 16, 2009

My former colleague and friend Nolan Goldberg has written this nice piece on "Securing Communications in the Cloud" regarding the Central District of Illinois decision in US v. Weaver (yet another child pornography case contributing to the development of information law). Nolan points out the Weaver court's focus on the unique nature of web (or cloud)-based email services. With webmail, a copy stored by the host in the cloud, in this case Microsoft Hotmail, might be the only copy, not just a backup. Therefore, the logic goes under the Stored Communications Act, the emails sought by the government in Weaver were not in electronic storage and the government only needed a trial subpoena, not a warrant.