Slashdot Mirror
Google Found Guilty of Libel For Search Results In Australia
Meshach writes "Google has been found guilty for refusing to take down a libelous search result in an Australian court (ruling). Music promoter Milorad Trkulja sued Google for refusing to take down links to website articles promoting libelous claims that Trkulja was connected to organized crime in Melbourne. Google told Trkulja to contact the sites on which the offensive materials were posted, as those webmasters controlled the content. But the Supreme Court of Victoria decided Google was responsible for removing the damaging links the moment Trkulja asked them to remove the content. As a result of the jury's decision in the case, Google will have to pay $200,000 in damages to Trkulja."
Well, in terms of speech anyway. I don't think this would fly in the US unless some other corporate behemoth was the victim of the libel.
can I sue Slashdot for libel? The bastards incorrectly put "Troll" and "Flamebait" next to my posts.
So, if you file a claim with Google -- probably not even under oath -- stating that certain content is libel, Google would then have to take down their links to the content, lest the Australian courts find that content to be libel and hold Google liable.
Which means that if you have access to the Australian courts, you can effectively cause Google to take down any website* without a trial, at little risk to yourself.
Good to know.
* Note: Anonymous Coward is not liable for damages incurred in the event that you attempt to take down a website owned by people with more money than you.
Clearly this isn't a case of Google doing anything wrong. It's a case of a judge or jury not understanding how the internet works.
Google doesn't own the content. Unless the individual wants to sue every search provider on the planet to get the results removed, he needs to go after the publisher/owner of the content, and not the search engine.
There are days that I hope the evil corporations are all destroyed in a revolution. There are other days that I think we are getting exactly what we deserve. Especially when 'educated' folks make decisions like this.
Google probably has the ability to deal with the problem, if it spent money to write some custom code or pattern matching rule. But it sounds like the judges don't understand the Internet or imagine Google could conceivably do the same thing times the number of people in the world who imagine something is libelous at some time in their lives. I don't get what was wrong with what Google told him to do. Is there no higher court in Australia? Or does Google maybe want to wait a while for the society to change in its favor before testing it.
> How can Google be responsible for content that it's just indexing and not generating themselves?
Because they've shown that they will take links down.
First it was "malware" and/or "phising" sites...
Then Scientology.
Then DMCA requests for linking to pirated whatever.
Sorry, but Google didn't have a defense for why they shouldnt take the links down when they've proven that they are willing to take other links down. It basically came down to "we'll do it for others, but we dont want to do it for this guy."
Fuck you Judge David Beach.
Now sue me, you wombat fucking pervert.
The International Collation of Wombats are suing you for libel for comparing them to the Judge David Beach.
Be seeing you...
If you read the judgement (radical idea, I know), you'll see that a big part of the reason that Google was found liable here was the cached version of the article, as well as the Google Image Search results (which are a "page of Google's own making" not merely a link or reference to another source).
Indeed the judgement makes it quite clear that merely linking or indexing is not considered publication under Australian common law. Google themselves have been found not guilty in similar cases in Australia before, by relying on this defence. But this case was a bit different. There was the image search results, which Google must be assumed under the law to be the original publisher of (who else could be, given that the page is generated by Google and not exist anywhere else on the web?).
18 The question of whether or not Google Inc was a publisher is a matter of mixed fact and law. In my view, it was open to the jury to find the facts in this proceeding in such a way as to entitle the jury to conclude that Google Inc was a publisher even before it had any notice from anybody acting on behalf of the plaintiff. The jury were entitled to conclude that Google Inc intended to publish the material that its automated systems produced, because that was what they were designed to do upon a search request being typed into one of Google Inc’s search products. In that sense, Google Inc is like the newsagent that sells a newspaper containing a defamatory article. While there might be no specific intention to publish defamatory material, there is a relevant intention by the newsagent to publish the newspaper for the purposes of the law of defamation.
19 By parity of reasoning, those who operate libraries have sometimes been held to be publishers for the purposes of defamation law. That said, newsagents, librarians and the like usually avoid liability for defamation because of their ability to avail themselves of the defence of innocent dissemination (a defence which Google Inc was able to avail itself of for publications of the images matter prior to 11 October 2009, and all of the publications of the web matter that were the subject of this proceeding).
20 As was pointed out by counsel for the plaintiff in his address to the jury, the first page of the images matter (containing the photographs I have referred to and each named “Michael Trkulja” and each with a caption “melbournecrime”) was a page not published by any person other than Google Inc. It was a page of Google Inc’s creation – put together as a result of the Google Inc search engine working as it was intended to work by those who wrote the relevant computer programs. It was a cut and paste creation (if somewhat more sophisticated than one involving cutting word or phrases from a newspaper and gluing them onto a piece of paper). If Google Inc’s submission was to be accepted then, while this page might on one view be the natural and probable consequence of the material published on the source page from which it is derived, there would be no actual original publisher of this page.
Read the judgement. Of particular relevance, the paragraphs beginning with paragraph 18. If they WERE just linking, then it would not be publication and they would not have been found guilty. But in this case, they were generating content themselves (under the legal definition, at least...)
It's OK... Slashdot covered it two weeks ago too... So it's not really slow, just the standard dupe.