Yet Another Person, Upset With Search Result Snippets, Sues Yahoo
from the sue-the-algorithm dept
This is certainly not the first time we've seen cases like this, but reader LM alerts us to a case down in Australia, where a guy is upset that the Yahoo search results on his name make him look like a criminal. So, he's now suing the company for defamation. Similar cases in the US and the UK have been tossed out, with courts properly recognizing that you can't blame a search engine company for "defamation" because its algorithms summarize other people's content in confusing ways. However, a ruling on a similar case in the Netherlands went the other way. Already, in Australia, the court has refused to grant summary judgment to Yahoo, so a full trial will soon be underway to take on this issue, but Australian courts apparently often look to similar UK rulings for guidance -- so last year's ruling, finding that automatically generated summary snippets in search engines were not defamatory, hopefully is a good sign.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: australia, defamation, search results
Reader Comments
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Yahoo? Who searches Yahoo?
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Re: Yahoo? Who searches Yahoo?
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Re: Re: Yahoo? Who searches Yahoo?
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What do we know about this person?
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Re: What do we know about this person?
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Re: Re: What do we know about this person?
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Why not write a book?
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FYI
Either or any way that will work this guy is outta luck!
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I guess I have a bit of a personal interest as I myself look quite bad if you do a search for my name but thankfully everyone at work knows that it is NOT ME on the searches and I already have a job
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