On Friday Google won a very important battle against their liability for content published on their search engines. The case had been brought by London-based Metropolitan International Schools who launched legal action over comments on the forum of a website that appeared in Google’s search results which they claimed were defamatory. However a high judge in London ruled Google as not liable for the defamatory comments and any comment that appears in news articles, blogs and forums displayed in its search results.Mr Justice Eady ruled that Google was a “facilitator” and not a publisher of the content.
He stated that “when a snippet is thrown up on the user’s screen in response to his search, it points him in the direction of an entry somewhere on the web that corresponds, to a greater or lesser extent, to the search terms he has typed in”
Interestingly Mr Eady also ruled that Google was not liable as a publisher of defamatory comments even when it had been notified that its search results contained potentially libellous comments. However he did go on to say that Google has a responsibility to block or take down content if a legitimate complaint had been made about certain content.
This is great news for the search engine market and I would go as far as to say that this is great news for the web as a whole. If Google had failed to win this case then it would have opened up all sorts of doors when it comes to content published on the web. The internet is hub for freedom for people to express themselves and cater for people with multitude of tastes. Although this does come with the downside of offensive material from time to time having search engines monitor and censor what people publish would take away a lot from what makes search engines so great.