Google is being asked to remove links to content that rights holders or government agencies find infringing or objectionable.
Is there any precedent or legal rationale for google and other search engines being liable for content of third-parties they direct people to? Or are they taking down results simply because (they consider) it’s the “right” thing to do?
When governments make laws regarding the use of your product in their jurisdiction, it’s normally considered good form to comply or you will likely face numerous legal obstacles of continuing to conduct business within that jurisdiction, as well as incur expensive legal bills trying to fight the laws.
The idea is that you could never search for something without the help of a search engine since the Internet is too big.
Google has a way to organize the results of their search engine and present the results to you. Without Google’s help you would have never have found that website since they are gleaning the URLs and presenting appropriate ones to you as they see fit.
Is the Dewey Decimal System liable for poorly-written library books?
Google’s removal of links is mostly the result of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A recent European court case will likely cause more links to be removed under the European “right to be forgotten”.
The RIAA and big multimedia folks haven’t felt threatened by the Dewey Decimal System and haven’t pushed for something like the Dewey Decimal Millennium Copyright Act.
Governments and big companies trying to tame the internet and get it ‘house-trained’ remind me of that story about the old woman trying to sweep the tide away from the beach. It can’t be done and we should all be thankful for it. There are thousands of search engines out there, if people want these links they will find them.
Taking my country, the UK, as an example. There was a time when any scandal concerning the royals could be kept totally under wraps in this country. The rest of the world might be talking about nothing else but the British public would remain in blissful ignorance, not a word in the press, not a peep from TV or radio. That day, thank God, is past and the British courts can issue as many gagging orders as they please. The internet will not be silenced and the British public can have access to the same stories as the rest of the world.
Long may the net remain independent.
Sorry - forgot what forum this was.
Why does there have to be precedent? The ruling is from the EU’s highest court. It becomes precedent. There has to be a first ruling for anything.
And since this is a court ruling and Google is bound to obey court rulings, what sense does it make to say they’re complying “simply because (they consider) it’s the “right” thing to do?”
Note that Google does NOT have to take down anything and everything that is contested. It must consider whether doing so complies with the court. Google has received over 40,000 requests. What becomes of them is impossible to say at this time.
The EU ruling comes AFTER Google has started removing results for copyright infringement, upon request.
It just doesn’t make sense to me that a company can be responsible for providing information about you can find information about topics (i.e. which websites match the search terms entered). THAT is the precedent I’m curious about.
*Please, let’s not get lost in a debate about the limits of government authority, censorship vs. free speech, American vs. European cultures, or any of the other tangents that take us into opinion/political territory. *
Infringement takedowns are covered by the DMCA, mentioned above. That was passed in 1998, which gives 16 years of precedent.
It’s not clear, but it seems that your second paragraph refers to the recent EU court decision I mentioned. It makes sense to very few people. If you’re not referring to that, please make clear what the reference is.
Looks like I mangled my 2nd post in editing. What I meant is “providing information about where you can find information about topics”
Google (the search engine) itself does not host any infringing, or even original content.
In the case of copyright infringement, the links they provide lead to a page (published by an independent third party) that contains download links to infringing material. In the case of the EU law, they provide links to articles and posts by news agencies, bloggers, online forums, etc. In both cases it is the third party that has committed the deed. How/when did Google (and other search engines) become legally responsible for the webpages it links to?
*How/when did Google (and other search engines) become legally responsible for the webpages it links to? *
No one is trying to hold Google responsible for the content it links to, they are holding Google responsible for providing links to that content.
The thing that never seems to get mentioned in these discussions is that Google has always made judgements about whether or not they will provide links to content. Many thousands of websites/pages have been black listed by Google since way before any legal challenges have come along. Google has always decided what content gets indexed and what doesn’t.
Although your specific scenario is not technically the case, the answer is the same: when a court decrees that it is.
Basically the court choose shooting the messenger. 
I recall in the early days techs wrote their own spiders to search the web. It may be time to do that again. Theres no telling whats out on the Internet getting ignored by Google and Bing. Python is a good option for coding a simple Spider.
Just another example of courts and politicians having no idea of what they are dealing with.
Of course we’ll just have to access a USA based server if an EC one censors pages referring to EC politicians and judges indulging in drug fuelled orgies.
For a while I was also troubled by the very same issue as the OP during the 1990s/2000s, back when people were first talking about how providers of an information service should or could be held liable for an illegal act that was done by users of their service.
Nobody holds a country’s postal service as being complicit in illegal activities when someone uses their services to do something illegal. Nobody holds a phone company responsible for what actionable things their customers might say over the phone lines.
And what also always concerned me was that internet providers could, in the USA, be pressured into providing info on their customers when ordered to do so by court, based on very flimsy reasons (i.e., just IP addresses).
That, and the ‘free speech zones’, were when I finally realized the US was not what it held itself up to be anymore.
Actually what the DMCA primarily did for service providers was protect them from liability for the transgressions of their users so long as they had procedures to disable access to illicit content. Google’s provision of search results is a service like any other. Why shouldn’t they be subject to the same obligations?
You mean Mata Hari could be back?!
That would be a false analogy. The recent ECJ ruling would be more like the library being ordered to remove certain records from its card catalog or internal database; the books would still be there but they’d become almost impossible to find.
The court has a slightly valid point, in that “collected information” has more value and is more useful than not connected. You can know someone’s phone number, but knowing everyone’s phone number and making that searchable is a far more useful piece of data - even though there is nothing secret or private about any one phone number. Creating a data collection has taken the value of the data to a whole new level.
Removing something from Google, or any other search engine, does not make the data disappear. But, it makes it several orders of magnitude harder to find any of it, let alone all of it. For example, one case was a person who wanted previous articles that embarrassed him removed. To find the articles after that, people would need to know where to look and what for.
The danger is, where does it stop? This was some average Jose wanting some bankruptcy details over a decade old removed. If him, why not anybody who was embarrassed? Why not force Google to not report criminal convictions once the sentence was served? Politicians who want scandals removed?
There’s no line between “good” and “bad” data, there’s just a grey continuum. Should your request to keep data private, for example, be private? Plus, for a company that collects every scrap of data in he world, also accommodating every request in the world can probably create a nightmare of filtering. I suspect the judges granting these requests are technologically backward enough they don’t truly understand the scope and magnitude of what they have granted. Plus - a company that provides unreliable or incomplete results will soon be replaced by one that works, and especially by one that avoids legal issues by locating outside the EU.