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Google Video Slapped with Privacy Violation in Italy

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In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy, recorded a video showing them illegally bullying an autistic schoolmate. They uploaded it to Google’s video-sharing site, and Google took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian local police. But the video had been posted for nearly two months by that time, and it caused national outrage, according to TheNextWeb.com. The video received 5,500 views, 80 comments, and made Google Italy’s “most entertaining” list, according to an Associated Press report.

Google helped the police identify the individual responsible for uploading the offending video. A court sentenced her and her accomplices to 10 months of community service. That’s where Google expected its involvement to end, according to a corporate blog posting on the case. However, a public prosecutor in Turin indicted four Google executives — chief legal officer David Drummond, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, former Google Video European Director Arvind Desikan, and former Chief Financial Officer George Reyes (who left the company in 2008) –– charging them with criminal defamation and failure to comply with Italian privacy law. In February 2010, a judge convicted the first three defendants on the privacy charge. All four were found not guilty of criminal defamation.

Matt Sucherman, a Google vice president and attorney, called the ruling “astonishing,” and the prosecutor’s action to try the executives “outrageous.” The company plans to appeal the conviction.

European Union law affords Internet hosting providers safe harbor from liability, wrote Sucherman in an official Google blog, “so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence.” But the Italian decision means employees of hosting platforms like Google are criminally responsible for content that users upload, according to Sucherman. If sites such as YouTube, social networks, and community bulletin boards are held responsible for vetting every single piece of uploaded content, the Web as we know it will cease to exist, Sucherman wrote.

In April 2010, the judge explained the reasoning underlying his verdict. In a 111-page opinion, Judge Oscar Magi said the executives were guilty of violating the privacy of the victimized youth and acted with malice because they had sought to make a profit with advertising income while hosting the video. Judge Magi said his decision should be interpreted as a requirement that Internet service providers screen video posted on their sites. Press accounts further quoted the opinion: “There is no such thing as the endless prairie of the Internet where everything is allowed and nothing can be prohibited.” [The opinion (PDF, 7.3MB) is available online in Italian only.]