Argentinian Appeals Court Realizes It's Ridiculous To Blame Google/Yahoo For Search Results People Don't Like

from the welcome-to-the-interwebz dept

Last year, we wrote about a court ruling in Argentina that found Google and Yahoo liable for defamation claims, after a celebrity was upset that searches on her name had results that pointed to pornographic websites. There had actually been a similar decision in Argentina the year before as well. It seems silly to blame search engines if people don't like the search results on their name, but that's what happened. Thankfully, however, in an appeal to the first case we linked to above, involving Virginia Da Cunha, the court found that the sites could only be held liable if they were made aware of the "illegal content," and then failed to remove it. In other words, the court is effectively using a notice-and-takedown safeharbor setup. There are still problems with that, but it's a hell of a lot better than automatically fining Google and Yahoo even if those companies had no idea about the fact someone was upset with the search results. Still, it's not great. As another article notes, without an official safe harbor, the only effective way to win cases like this is to have the money to go to court. Even Google and Yahoo are still fighting a bunch of similar lawsuits and will have to keep going through the process, until there's a real safe harbor in place.
Hide this

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.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: argentina, defamation, liability
Companies: google, yahoo


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 23 Aug 2010 @ 7:55pm

    Webcrawlers care not for your opinions of search results.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Tom, 23 Aug 2010 @ 8:28pm

    Argentian?

    Mike, you might want to correct the spelling for the title to Argentinean or Argentinian to get it correct.
    Tom

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 23 Aug 2010 @ 10:23pm

    I hope those fuckers die in a terrible glue accident...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. icon
    Mike Masnick (profile), 23 Aug 2010 @ 10:47pm

    Re: Argentian?

    Oops. Typo. Fixed. Thanks.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Aug 2010 @ 7:10am

    Virginia Da Cunha? Who?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Jesse, 24 Aug 2010 @ 8:00am

    Saying that this is better is like choosing the less smelly outhouse.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.