Australian Court Rules Google Isn't a Publisher

[ne0h]

Did you all read this?

Google has prevailed in its long-running battle over potentially defamatory web links. Australia's High Court has ruled Google wasn't the publisher of a link to a 2004 story in The Age that allegedly tarnished state lawyer George Defteros, who represented people implicated in the Melbourne gangland killings and briefly faced charges himself. As The Guardian reports, five of seven court justices found that the search result link "merely facilitated access" to the story — Google didn't play a part in writing or distributing the content.


[engadget.com...]

[lucy24]

One might quibble that there is a big difference between “G wasn’t a publisher in 2004”(!) and “G isn’t a publisher today”.

[Lexur]

That only proves that Google has money in spades and can afford the best lawyers because:

- anyone who does a search like "blue shoes" will find a lot of editorial/commercial content of all kinds but very few links

- if it is accepted that it is not a publisher it should be prohibited from establishing editorial criteria for selecting content and should treat everyone equally on the basis of open standards