Google Convicted by Italian Court
February 26th, 2010 by adminAn Italian court has convicted three Google employees for violations of the country’s privacy policy.
Each of the three employees has been given a six month suspended sentence for a video that that was hosted by Google portraying an autistic child being bullied by other children.
This shock ruling may lead to ground-breaking changes in current EU law as until now, the EU’s E-Commerce Directive protected service providers from liability for material they had not created or monitored but had instead simply stored or passed on to users of their service.
The offensive video was filmed by school pupils in Turin as they bullied an autistic schoolmate. The video was then posted on YouTube, where Google removed the video within hours of it appearing on the site, and helped police identity the individual who uploaded the video.
Four Google employees, some of whom no longer worked for the search engine giant, were charged, with three of these subsequently being convicted.
Google does not monitor content that is uploaded to YouTube but instead uses a complaints procedure to discover any inappropriate content. The Italian court believed that the result of this meant Google actually had insufficient staff numbers to review and monitor content on the site. The court also established that service providers will not be exempt from liability under the Ecommerce Directive unless they were pro-active in their approach to remove all unlawful content upon becoming aware of such.
Google will appeal the ruling on the basis that the court’s decision has undermined the legal basis of scores of the internet’s most well-liked services.
