14 DAY TRIAL // Google is no stranger to lawsuits, some bigger than others. Rarely though it meets an opponent who has the resources to keep the fight going for years and isn't some big name corporation. But Max Mosley is that opponent.
He's been trying to get rid of any trace of his Nazi-themed (a court disagreed with the Nazi part) "adult" party indiscretions off the Internet for years now because Mosley is one of those people who believes you can "remove" things from the Internet. He is old though, so it's perhaps understandable, though not too old to party it seems.
He, or rather, his lawyers have been sending takedown notices to various sites that hosted the video or images for years but, somehow, the video keeps on popping up. Not only that, but some sites have the nerve to ignore Mosley's lawyers and the British courts.
So Mosley's solution is to force Google to get rid of the problem for him. The search engine, understandably, doesn't want to start censoring results just because someone doesn't like them. The lawsuit is now being heard by an European court.
"The law says platforms should not be forced to become Internet police, monitoring all content to prevent certain material from ever getting online," Daphne Keller, Google Associate General Counsel, wrote.
"In a Paris courtroom today, former Formula One head Max Mosley's lawyers asked a judge to upset this balance by imposing an alarming new model of automated censorship. He wants web companies to build software filters, in an attempt to automatically detect and delete certain content," she added.
The company has a problem with the idea of automated content removal, arguing that algorithms can't decide whether an image or video is posted legitimately or not and that this is for a judge to decide, not a computer.
Of course, Google does already have automated censorship tools, available to copyright owners who are making the most of them, removing millions of links from Google search results on a regular basis.