14 DAY TRIAL // Italy and Google had already shown that they simply cannot be on friendly terms. Another confirmation recently came when an Italian court decided to order the Mountain View company to censor certain Google Instant results, although the defendants argued that the suggestions were computer-generated.
This case came to light via the plaintiff's lawyer, Carlo Piana, who described the situation and the decision on his personal blog.
It seems that when using Google to search for an Italian public figure (Piana would not reveal the name), the suggestions would include terms such as truffatore ('con man') and truffa ('fraud').
These results were considered defamatory so Google was requested to filter them from its database, so that they would no longer be publicly available.
A representative for the search giant argued that: “We believe that Google should not be held liable for terms that appear in autocomplete as these are predicted by computer algorithms based on searches from previous users, not by Google itself.”
This is why the Californian company attempted to claim the shelter of the E-Commerce Directive's safe harbour provisions meant to protect hosting and ISPs from being liable for all content stored on or transmitted over their networks.
Nonetheless, the Milan court in charge with settling this case ruled that Google will have to remove all libelous references to the person in question.
Once the decision was made public, Piana declared that he “[...] showed that this is content produced by them (and by the way, they do filter out certain content, including terms that are known to be used to distribute copyright-infringing material), although through automated means.”
In an endeavor to soften the blow to Google, Piana emphasized that winning this case should not be viewed as support for increased censorship, but rather as protecting the reputation of his client.
This is not the first time Google got into conflict with the Italian authorities, nor the first time the company lost a case, it is merely evidence that its varied services are often misused and that someone needs to pay.