Judge: Google not liable for defamation from search results – TECH.BLORGE.com

Google and search engines like it act as giant Hoovers, sucking up content from around the Web and making it possible for users to find. Without search engine such as Google, the Web would be an impossible place to navigate. But is Google liable for the comments contained in its search results?

The answer, quite rightly, is no, although that isn’t set in law everywhere around the world. In the U.S., Google and other search engines are protected from getting sued for comments in search results by Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act, which states that service providers are not to be considered the publishers of the information.

Now, according to The Guardian, search engines are protected by a landmark ruling for U.K. defamation law. A defamation case was brought by Metropolitan International Schools (MIS), also known as SkillsTrain and Train2Game. The lawsuit against Google claimed that the search giant was responsible for comments made in a forum about the company’s services.

However, in the high court, Justice Eady ruled that Google cannot and should not be held liable for these comments because it was merely a facilitator rather than the publisher of these comments. He pointed at the vast amount of information processed by Google and how the whole operation is run automatically rather than by human hand.

He summed up by saying:

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. It is for him to access or not, as he chooses. [Google] has merely, by the provision of its search service, played the role of a facilitator.

Many countries are now putting laws in place to protect search engines from these kinds of claim but Google, as the market leader, still finds itself having to defend its right to aggregate content from around the Web without being held accountable for that content.

I can’t quite believe this claim even got as far as the high court. I can understand MIS’s desire to defend its reputation which was being ripped to shreds online, but to lump Google in as being part of the problem seems to be pushing the case a little.

If Google had lost this case then I shudder to contemplate the consequences. It would have opened the floodgates for similar claims from parties which have found themselves defamed online. By all means, the person or site responsible for the comments should be held accountable, but Google? I really can’t fathom it.