MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment NT1 & NT2 v Google LLC of convictions, without proper safeguards to allow adequate examination of the proportionality of the interference with Article 8 rights that it involved. The balance that the law requires was identified by the the Court of Appeal at [63]: the “balance between the rights of individuals to put their past behind them, and what is necessary in a democratic society”. Factors identified as relevant in striking that balance included "the nature of the offence, the disposal in the case, the time which has elapsed since the offence took place, or the relevance of the data to the employment sought”: [41]. 49. So much for the potential for information about convictions to be or become confidential or private. The question of whether the common law of misuse of private information should afford reporting privileges akin to those established by the common law, and extended by statute, in defamation and contempt of court has been discussed in at least one text, which has suggested that the law would be likely to follow the same contours (see Tugendhat and Christie, The Law of Privacy and the Media, 3rd edition at paras 11.64ff). Some cases have come close to addressing the question (see not only CG but also Crossley v Newsquest (Midlands South) Ltd [2008] EWHC 3054 (QB) [58] (Eady J), citing R v Arundel Justices ex parte Westminster Press [1985] 1 WLR 708), but the issue has never arisen directly for decision by the Court in a context such as the present. The E-Commerce Directive and Regulations 50. There is one other feature of the legal landscape that I should mention, if only to clear it out of the way for the record: Directive 2000/31/EC on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market, of 8 June 2000 (“the E-Commerce Directive”), and its corresponding domestic implementing legislation, The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 (SI 2002/2013) (“the E-Commerce Regulations”). At the start of this trial it was Google’s case that the activities undertaken by Google Search amount to “caching” so that it was entitled to an exemption from any obligation to pay compensation unless and until the underlying material had been removed from the third-party website or the Court had ruled on the issue, pursuant to Article 13 of the Directive and the corresponding Regulation 18. That was disputed by the claimants and the ICO, and was to be one of the issues for resolution by me. But after hearing the ICO’s submissions on this issue Google withdrew its reliance on those provisions in this case. Mr White explained that whilst the company still considered the argument to be correct in law, it had considered in particular the submissions of Ms Proops as to the burden of regulatory oversight which Google’s legal analysis would place on the ICO. It had decided that it should give further consideration to the issue, and in particular the relationship between these provisions of the E-Commerce Directive and Regulations and s 13 of the DPA. THE NT1 CASE The issues 51. It is now possible to define more precisely the claims and issues.