A step in the wrong direction
A potentially profound precedent has been set by an Italian court, following its decision to convict three Google executives for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.
Back in 2006, before it acquired YouTube, Google had Google Video. Late that year some Italian students uploaded a video onto Google Video showing them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The Italian police were made aware of the video and notified Google, which soon took it down.
That was far from the end of the matter, however. A public prosecutor indicted four Google employees for criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. In effect, these employees were being made personally accountable for the content uploaded onto Google Video.
Today, Google blogged that a Judge in Milan has convicted David Drummond - chief legal officer - Peter Fleischer - global privacy counsel - and George Reyes - former CFO who left in 2008 - on the privacy count but not the defamation one. Totally acquitted was Arvind Desikan, who was a product marketing manager at the time.
"In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload," said Matt Sucherman - Google's EMEA deputy general counsel - in a blog post.
He goes on to point out that European Union law "was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence."
The big issue here, over and above the legal implications for Google (which must be thinking warm thoughts about Europe today), is the precedent set for Internet freedom in general. An increasing proportion of all that happens online involves end-users uploading content onto hosting sites. This could mean people posting opinions on this story, social networking or uploading images or video.
If hosts are to be made legally liable for anything uploaded by a third party onto their site, the whole model becomes untenable and, as Sucherman concludes "then the Web as we know it will cease to exist."
Let's hope this ruling is derided as the erroneous ‘judgment' it clearly is and is overturned on appeal. But even if it isn't, and it becomes legal precedent, the genie is already out of the bottle and people will continue to post their stuff online. Hosting sites already police what is uploaded and that's the most that can be asked of them. The system isn't broken, let's not try to fix it.
