Google is sued for US$208,000 in a defamation case in Australia

In an interesting legal case in Australia recently, a jury in the supreme court of Victoria ruled that Google is liable for defamation because its search results connected the plaintiff, 62-year-old Milorad Trkulja, to phrases such as “Melbourne crime” and showed his photo near images of suspected members of Melbourne’s organised crime scene. The ruling can have wider consequences for the role of search engines and the results they display.

The plaintiff had used Google’s search quality form to have content from other websites removed from its search index, but failed to provide the URL of the content to which he was objecting. Due to that, the Victorian jury ruled Google was not liable for its web search results, but guilty of defamation because of its image search results, which remained unchanged after the plaintiff’s request. The jury found that Google should have removed those results when it received Trkulja’s complaint.

It’s a complicated and unusual case that resulted in Google being ordered to pay the equivalent of US$208,000. Trkulja had previously won a similar case against Yahoo, which was ordered to pay about US$225,000 in damages.

Google is examining the original jury verdict and may file an appeal as it disagrees with the Judge’s comparison to it as an online publisher. A Google spokesperson said: “Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. The sites in Google’s search results are controlled by those sites’ webmasters, not by Google” .

Whether or not an appeal is filed and Google prevails with a favourable outcome remains to be seen. However, the potential ramifications of this ruling place more emphasis on Google and other search engines to police their search results, or at least to have a policy to respond to complaints about the way search results are displayed.

If you’d like to know more about how the search or image results on Google can affect you, or your business, contact us now for more information.

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