Google is a 'publisher' says Aussie court as it hands £20k damages to gangland lawyer
- Reference: 1588261024
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/30/google_publisher_australian_court_rules/
- Source link:
Today the Australian state of Victoria's highest court ruled that Google was legally liable for publishing an excerpt from a 2004 report in its search results pages.
George Defteros, described as having represented [1]numerous gangland figures in criminal trials, sued the adtech monolith in the Victoria Supreme Court. Google searches for his name returned a news story by local newspaper The Age , reporting that in 2004 he had been charged with conspiracy to murder.
The charges were dropped in 2005 and an exonerated Defteros continued his legal career.
Supreme court judge Melinda Richards "ruled that the article, first published in the Age in 2004, had implied that Defteros crossed a line from professional lawyer for, to confidant and friend of, criminal elements," according to the Australian Associated Press.
Defteros was said to have been aware of the article "since at least 2007." A preliminary [2]ruling in the same case revealed that he "notified Google of the publication of the web matter on 4 February 2016," arguing that Google's liability kicked in "a reasonable time after notification." Local judges appear to have agreed with this line of argument.
The full judgment was not immediately available from the court itself or the [3]Austlii online library of the commonwealth's judgments .
Reports of today's ruling did not state whether Defteros had sued The Age itself; however, he reportedly previously won AU$20,000 (~£10,000) after suing author John Silvester and colleague Andrew Rule over a chapter of a book based on the article.
Google has had a torrid time while claiming not to be responsible for search results on its webpages. Earlier this month, French authorities told it to start paying news organisations for publishing snippets of stories, on the grounds that Google's practices were “ [4]likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant position .”
Back Down Under, the Aussie federal government made a similar demand – and went one step further by asking Google to [5]also reveal details of its search ranking algorithms , the company's secret sauce. That echoes a recent London High Court ruling telling the American firm to either [6]withdraw key evidence from a lawsuit or let an SEO expert read those same algorithms.
In 2018 the adtech company won a partial victory in a lawsuit brought jointly by [7]two convicted criminals who wanted their pasts scrubbed from Google search results . ®
Sponsored: [8]How To Accelerate Brilliant Digital Experiences With Low-Code
[1] https://www.victorharbortimes.com.au/story/6741152/gangland-lawyer-wins-40k-in-google-suit/
[2] http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VSC/2018/375.html?context=1;query=defteros;mask_path=
[3] http://www.austlii.edu.au/database-cases.html
[4] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/10/french_competition_authority_orders_google/
[5] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/20/australia_to_make_web_media_giants_pay_for_content/
[6] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/03/google_foundem_high_court_seo_expert/
[7] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/13/google_right_be_forgotten_trial_nt2_victory_nt1_loss/
[8] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8552/how-to-accelerate-brilliant-digital-experiences-with-low-code?td=wptl1936
Google does cache webpages but not for that long.
Really this is stupid, is not a publisher, is a web search engine. You may as well sue libraries for having copies of newspapers too.
I am pretty sure that the argument is that the argument is *no* longer relevant as the charges were reversed (dropped, but Google's search results fail to reflect that fact with no update or link to this additional information. A dismissed issue is no issue at all; I would personally believe that Google's responsibility is based upon the ranking of the, now, depreciated article (if Google places the accusation article highly but places the correction articles poorly).
But isn't a fact exactly that, a fact? The lawyer was charged. Fact of action, by the police, and is public record. It doesn't matter if the charges were dropped later. The charges were filed.
This looks a lot like 1984 , where the past gets scrubbed and rewritten.
So by your argument... anyone charged with any kind of crime deserves to have that follow them around for the rest of their life... with no regard what so ever to the facts/truth regarding those 'allegations'.
If nothing has been proven and charges were dropped... then there is no reason to continue to 'publish' links to said 'incorrect' article from 16yrs ago.
Innocent until proven guilty obviously doesn't apply in your mind... and having false allegations made against people can ruin lives regardless of any conviction not being applied.
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that Google has no indexed articles that mention that the charges were dropped. If they DON'T, then the argument might hold water; if they DO, and they are available with an appropriate search then, as far as I can see, they plaintiff has no case.
Insert requisite "IANAL" disclaimer here.
Can easily find the article
Searching for "George Defteros" shows lots of articles about this recent ruling. To get the the controversial article you need "George Defteros the age 2004". The link is not on the first page returned by Google but Bing does put it on the first page.
Was The Age legally required to rectify the old article?
Re: Can easily find the article
Presumably Bing will receive the same fine?
I hate Google as much as the next person, but agree they should not be held responsible unless they specifically went against a court ruling.
Surely any search engine that shows the article in their results should receive the fine??
While £20K to Google is probably not even 10 seconds worth of profit it does set a worrying precedence that a search engine can be found liable for showing snippets of an article from a third party website.
There's a reason for the term Kangaroo Court
Bottom line is if you are charged with a crime & later the charges are dropped or you are otherwise exonerated, it's still a historical fact that you were once charged. Rewriting history isn't the solution unless you are fundamentally dishonest.
Right to be forgotten?
I thought Google implemented that. Or did they decide to stop doing that?
I have no problem with the contention that google are considered a publisher for all material published (I.e. served to an end user) by their servers. This isn’t particularly outrageous. Further, it appears in this case it isn’t the initial publishing of the information that is the subject of the complaint, it was continuing to present the results post notification. This isn’t that far removed from the Spanish case!
The interesting point in this case, and the Spanish case, is that the original website probably has a legitimate interest defence on the original article which sounds like it is an archive site. However old newspapers may no longer be relevant, and google really shouldn’t be allowed to present archive material as recent results, especially once warned presenting without full context could be defamatory.
Any other ruling on “Are google the publisher?” raises the question of who is the publisher for information served by aggregators and other social media sites: I am pretty certain The Age would legitimately be able to defend having their archive available online (not a major problem as most people wont find the article there anyway, and without google etc would almost certainly appreciate the context if they did) and how can they be held liable for the actions of Google? This principle is clearly covered in the EU at least where it is clear that public domain data (I.e. The Age archives) can still be protected data (I.e. not fair game for google to scrape and publish all over the internet).
I'm not a Google fanboi by any means, but if there is a webpage with (apparently) relevant information, shouldn't a web search return a link in its results?
Now if Google were archiving the offending webpage after it was legally obliged to be taken down -and- returned the link in a search, that is a problem.
It would help to know if The Age were still publishing the article after it had been legally required to take it down.