Google warns against forcing it to censor the Internet
Google has warned of a devastating impact on the Internet if a court ruling that the search giant is responsible for defamatory material contained in hyperlinked pages is not overturned.
The company warned in a Supreme Court memorandum that it may have to monitor its search results if attorney George Demetrius allows for $40,000 in defamation damages.
Deferos succeeded in filing a lawsuit against Google. He argued that its publication of the results of the research, which included an article published in 2004 about his arrest on charges of plotting to kill the accused, made him famous.
Supreme Court Justice Melinda Richards ruled in 2020 that the article implied that Demetrius had transformed from a professional lawyer into a confidant of criminal elements.
The Victoria Court of Appeal rejected a request by Google to overturn the finding. Lawyers for Demetrius contacted the search firm in 2016 demanding that the article be removed. But Google refused on the grounds that the source of the article was reputable.
Google's lawyers told the Supreme Court that the notice contained false allegations that Deferos had sued the article's source for defamation and that the article's source had agreed to be removed from its website.
Google has warned that it may be liable as the publisher of any material posted on the web that provides hyperlinked search results.
Google warns of devastating impact if court ruling is not overturned
The tech company argued that it was not the publisher of the material because the hyperlink does not in and of itself represent a transfer of what it is linked to.
Google said websites should be held liable if the hyperlink actually repeats the defamatory assumption to which it is linked.
It also asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the defence of conditional privilege. It said it believed its users had a legitimate interest in accessing the material.
In 2018, the court gave the green light to defamation claims against search engines. Milorad Turk has filed a case against Google over a series of images and results that he claims are defamatory.
The Supreme Court ruled in September last year in the Dylan Fuller case that social media users are liable for posting defamatory comments by a third party on their social media posts.
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