Milan — This is rather disturbing news, we just reported a massive copyright lawsuit filed by a Russian company and now four Google executives are facing defamation charges in Italy for failing to stop a video being uploaded that shows a disabled kid getting bullied. An Italian prosecutor has called for four former and current Google officials to stand trial on charges of “defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data” in Italy, court sources said late last week.
This all stems from a user uploaded offending video only appeared on Google Video, the three-minute video in question depicts four teens teasing and harassing a boy with Down’s syndrome, and hitting him over the head with a pack of tissues.
The video was filmed in 2006 using a mobile phone and was posted back in September 2006, on Google Video, one of the company’s video upload sites. It showed four male high school students in the Italian city of Turin humiliating the youth.
The Italian prosecutor, Francesco Cajani, has ordered the defendants to appear in a Milan court on February 3rd 2009, to face charges of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data, an anonymous source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The order was issued after conducting an inquiry into a complaint filed by an Italian Down syndrome support group, Vividown and the boy’s father.
The prosecutors seem to be apprehensive because the video also highlighted the boy’s disability, which could violate Italian data protection laws, said Marco Pancini, Google’s European public policy counsel.
Google has completely cooperated with Italian authorities in their investigation and expressed “disappointment” with the decision to press charges against its employees. Google removed the video within a day after it received a complaint from the Italian Interior Ministry, which has a department that investigates Internet-related crime. By that time, the video has pulled together around 12,000 hits.
Google does not know the exact charges yet, Pancini said. “Under EU law, Google is not required to monitor third-party content on its sites.”
Google maintains charges against the employees are unwarranted, Pancini said. Europe’s E-commerce Directive exempts service providers from prescreening content before it is publicly posted, he said. Also, the video was technically uploaded to a Google server in the U.S., not in Italy, Pancini said.
“It was a terrible video,” Pancini said, adding that Google is concerned about the case’s impact on censorship on the Internet.
Although official notice of the decision had yet to be received, a Google spokesman said in a statement the case risked setting a worrisome precedent, which could set for censorship on the internet, and I have to agree. At least one of these employees has never lived in Italy, and furthermore, the video was uploaded to a server in the US.
The defendants include David C. Drummond, a Google senior vice president, corporate development and chief legal officer. Pancini said Drummond did paperwork to create Google Italy, but has never lived in the country.
When news of the case broke in July, Google said it would cooperate with prosecutors “to show that all Googlers under investigation have no involvement in the Vividown case.”
But above all that, the bigger question is how can you punish these Google employees for something one of their users did? If they do get convicted it threatens YouTube, Google Video, and just about every site with user generated content.
Interestingly the judge in the case is prepared to drop the charges of defamation and breach of privacy against the boys in the case if they own up to what they did, but apparently is not showing the same type of leniency towards Google.
Google did not believe it should be punished for the way its site was used by third parties, Pancini said.