Milan, Italy — Global search leader Google slammed with another surprising and severe setback in Italy on Feb. 24, when a Milan court in a landmark ruling establish that the three company executives guilty of privacy offenses in association to a contentious video clip uploaded on Google’s YouTube video-sharing service in 2006, which the critics said could severely curtail Internet freedom.
Judge Oscar Magi, in Milan, Italy, on Wednesday sentenced the three Google executives — David Drummond, senior vice-president and chief legal officer, George Reyes, Google’s former chief financial officer, and Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel — were each given a six-month suspended prison sentence, but were cleared of defamation charges, while acquitting a fourth defendant, Arvind Desikan, senior product marketing manager, on all charges.
The issue originated from a video that was uploaded to YouTube back in September 2006, that showed four high school boys in a classroom in Turin, Italy, taunting another boy with a mental disability, if not overruled on appeal, could signal a demise to online user-generated content in parts of the world.
In what privacy analysts described as a “chilling judgment,” a judge in Milan imposed suspended prison sentences on the men who he said were criminally liable for allowing the posting of a clip on Google’s video service which featured the bullying of an autistic child.
The condemnation, for violating the victim’s privacy, was welcomed by lawyers for Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down’s syndrome, which had brought the charges.
The long awaited and closely-watched decision marked a significant challenge to the basic principle and legal observers claimed that the case had worrying implications for all the Internet Service Providers and “hosting platforms” such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter which do not create their own content are not responsible for the material that users upload.
Google called the judgment “surprising” and pledged to appeal. The case “poses an essential question for the freedom on which the Internet is built,” said company spokesman William Echikson in a videotaped statement posted on the YouTube’s Website.
Echikson said: “This is the first time a Google employee has been convicted for [violation of] privacy anywhere in the world. It is an astonishing decision that attacks the principle of freedom of expression.”
Italian bloggers also criticized the verdict, with one blogger on the La Stampa website declaring: “From today we are less Western and more Chinese.”
Alfredo Robledo, the prosecutor, said that he was “really content” with the verdict in the case, adding: “Protection of human beings must prevail over business logic.” Robledo added that the video, which was posted on September 8, 2006, had remained online until November 7 and should have been taken down immediately.
During the trial the prosecutors charged Google of negligence, saying the video remained online for two months, even though Google received two requests to remove the video in early November, one from a user and one from the Italian Interior Ministry. But Google argued that it had complied with the law by taking it down when contacted by the Italian authorities within 24 hours and assisted prosecutors in bringing those responsible to court.
In a blog post, Matt Sucherman, Google’s VP and deputy general counsel for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, calls the decision “deeply distressing” and warns that by rejecting the principle that service providers should be shielded from liability for the content they host, the court’s decision attacks the foundations of the Internet.
“If that fundamental is moved aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held accountable for inspecting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear,” he said.
In recent months the censoring of Italian websites has become a controversial issue following a spate of hate sites against officials, including the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
The woman responsible for uploading the video was traced and subsequently sentenced to ten months’ community service by a court in Turin.
Drummond mentioned that he was outraged by the verdict. “If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our positions at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability,” he said. European and Italian law clearly recognized that internet hosting providers “are not required to monitor content that they host,” Drummond said. He added: “Once Google learnt of the offending video, it removed it.”
Fleischer stated that he knew “nothing about the video until after it was removed … I was very saddened by the plight of the boy in the video, not least as I have devoted my professional life to preserving and protecting personal privacy rights. I recognize that I am just a pawn in a larger battle of forces, but I remain confident that today’s ruling will be overturned on appeal.”
The Equal Opportunities minister, Mara Carfagna, said: “Italy will not tolerate incidents of discrimination of any sort, let alone against the disabled,” and added: “Those responsible for creating this idiocy will be prosecuted.” Facebook operators in the US shut the group down soon after.
The court ruling comes as Google is embroiled in a dispute with China about alleged censorship. Last month it threatened to shut down google.cn, its Chinese-language search engine, unless it is allowed to deliver unfiltered Internet search results in the world’s most populous country. Google made the ultimatum over what it said were cyber attacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.