French Court Forcing Google To Remove Word 'Scam' From Google Suggest
from the public-interest? dept
Last year we wrote about two contradictory rulings in France involving lawsuits by companies upset about how Google Suggest works. As you probably know, as you type a query into Google, it tries to "suggest" the rest of the query, based on common searches beginning with what you typed. This is all done automatically and is an algorithmic function of what people are actually searching on. The "problem" was that in one case, people were searching for the name of a company, Centre National Prive de Formation a Distance (CNFDI), and one of the most popular searches, meaning one of the suggested searches, was to follow CNFDI with "arnaque," which means "scam." In one case, from a company called Direct Energie, the court ruled that it was Google's fault -- and oddly blamed the fact that the results were not alphabetical to suggest Google was at fault. The better ruling came in the CNFDI case where the court pointed out that search engines are "important tools for the free circulation of ideas and information," and the fact that many people were questioning whether CNFDI was a scam was, in fact, important and potentially useful information, and thus not libelous by itself. It also said that the burden on free speech would be too great if Google were forced to remove the suggestion.So much for that ruling. Reader Mike Read has sent in the news that an appeals court has reversed the CNFDI ruling and found Google liable. Its reasoning is that Google lets people alert the company to "offensive" terms in Google suggest, and it believes that "scam" is an offensive term. I have to question that logic. If people are legitimately concerned that there are scams going on, why shouldn't that be expressed?
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Filed Under: defamation, france, google suggest, scam
Companies: cnfdi, google
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everytime someone searchs for "french court system"
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Now they are at fault b/c of what people search for? Question is though, if they turned off the suggestion list in France, and people still searched for CNFDI Scam...would they still be liable?
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Ridiculous.
Perhaps the courts should also block "corruption" from suggest, to prevent association of the term with any questionable practices of leaders in the country...
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Re:
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Why
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Re:
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tl;dr Frak 'em.
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Pull out of France?
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maybe they should stop scamming people and suing and actually improve their reputation.
in fact, doesn't this suit alert more people to their scamming ways?
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Re: Why
Why do I?
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I Wonder if Google isn't shooting themselves in the foot?
For example "Mormonism is'. Try Christianity, try Hinduism, try Astrology, try Numerology. Every single one of them gives you some sort of list. Some of the suggestions are rather rude.
Then try 'Islam is'. You get nothing. Now, you can't tell me nobody searches for Islam ....
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Re: I Wonder if Google isn't shooting themselves in the foot?
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Re: Why
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Re: I Wonder if Google isn't shooting themselves in the foot?
That is even cooler than when typing in "why won't" ended in "my parakeet eat my diarrhea". (I'm not kidding.)
I'm going to show everyone this.
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Scamdal
Is it true that Centre National Prive de Formation a Distance raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? Because people are saying that they heard that somewhere...
Scamdalous!
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Not sure though.
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French Words
scam - arnaquer, escroquerie (f., colloquial)
offensive - offensif
corrupt - corrompué
ridiculous - ridicule
litigious - litigieux
Excuse me, I need to go do some searches...
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Re: Pull out of France?
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Re: I Wonder if Google isn't shooting themselves in the foot?
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SCAM JOURNAL - ijcaonline.org
International Journal of Computer Applications
ijcaonline.org
The best place to publish nonsensical papers!!!
Papers published by IJCA have no recognition in most Universities!!
Blacklisted by several universities in Europe, US and Asia!!
International Journal of Computer Applications
ijcaonline.org
a SCAM JOURNAL!!! BEWARE!!!!
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