French Court Orders Google To Block Pictures of Ex-F1 Chief Mosley

Virtucon writes "This one goes to the old adage 'closing the stable door after the horse bolted.' A French court on Wednesday ruled that Google must remove from its search results photos of a former Formula One racing chief, Max Mosley, participating in an Nazi-themed orgy. Google could be fined up to 1,000 Euros/day for not complying. What's strange here is that Mosley A) Sued in a French Court B) Didn't go after anybody else other than Google and C) has definitely strange tastes in extracurricular activities. In this day and age it's laughable to think that once your private photos/videos hit the Internet that you have any expectation of reining them in or filtering the embarrassing parts out. Google isn't the only game in town so to speak in terms of Internet search. I wonder if his lawyers checked out Yahoo or WebCrawler?"

Comments

Re:Why is he special?

[shadowknot]

It also doesn't help his case that he's the son of a noted British fascist leader. Dressing up like a Nazi to get your rocks off when your dad was a Mussolini-loving totalitarian probably isn't a good idea, no matter how much hush money you think you can put up to keep it quiet. Interesting though that the FIA is based in France, I wonder if the courts had any incentive to rule in his favor eh?

Libelous summery?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of the court cases has been it was not a Nazi themed orgy. The newspapers and the prostitutes just made that bit up to sell papers. In fact it has been proven it court that it was merely an Englishman going to a brothel to be beaten by dominatrix prostitutes and his right to do so privately has now been upheld by the French courts.

Not Nazi, just German

[divec]

A central reason that Mosley won the original privacy case in the High Court in London is that the judge rejected News Group Newspapers' claim that it was a "Nazi" scenario because they were speaking German (see paragraph 72 of the judgment). The judge found that there was no reason to think the orgy was Nazi-themed, and therefore there was no public interest to justify the privacy violation.