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| Google warns against forcing it to censor the Internet |
Google has warned of the devastating effects on the Internet if a court holds the search giant responsible for defamatory material on linked sites.
The company warned in a Supreme Court filing that it may have to monitor search results if attorney George Deveros is allowed to seek $40,000 in defamation damages.
Deferos has successfully sued Google. He argues that the publication of the study's findings, including a 2004 article about his arrest for conspiracy to murder an accused, made him famous.
Supreme Court Justice Melinda Richards ruled in 2020 that the article indicated that Deferos had gone from a professional lawyer to a close friend of criminals.
The Victoria Court of Appeal rejected Google's request to overturn the decision. Defteros' lawyers contacted the research firm in 2016 to demand that the article be removed. However, Google denied this, citing the article's authoritative source.
Google's attorneys told the Supreme Court that the notice contained false allegations that Deferos sued the article's source for defamation and that the article's source agreed to be removed from its site.
Google warns that it may be held liable as the publisher for material on the web whose search results contain hyperlinks.
Google warns of dire consequences if court ruling is not overturned
The technology company argued that it was not the publisher of the material because the hyperlink itself does not constitute a transmission of the linked content.
Google said the site should be held liable if the hyperlink does indeed repeat the defamatory statement it links to.
He also called on the Supreme Court to reconsider the conditional privilege defense. It said it believed that its users had a legitimate interest in accessing the material.
In 2018, a court approved a defamation suit against the search engine. Milorad Turkulja is suing Google over a series of images and results that he says are defamatory.
Last September, in the Dylan Fuller case, the Supreme Court ruled that social media users should be held liable as third-party publishers for defamatory comments on their social media posts.