French Court: Google can be ordered to filter piracy-related search terms
Last week, the French Supreme Court ruled that Google can be ordered to filter piracy-related search terms from its Instant and Autocomplete services. According to the Court, Google is not liable for copyright infringements that take place on other websites. However, the company does have the responsibility to make it more difficult for the public to find illegal content. Thereby, Google helps to prevent future infringements, says the Court.
In 2010, French music industry group SNEP sued Google, arguing that Google facilitates piracy by adding piracy related keywords, including 'torrent', 'RapidShare' and 'MegaUpload' when users enter the name of popular artists in the search box. SNEP lost the case in two lower courts, but has the Supreme Court on its hand now. The case is going back to the Court of Appeal for a final decision.
Google is disappointed by the court's ruling. The company announced in December 2010 already that it would take measures to prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. Autocomplete works with an algorithm that predicts search queries based on other users' search activities. According to Google, it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content though.
The French lawsuit is one of many cases about the responsibility of intermediaries. For example, in April of this year, a German Court ruled that Google's YouTube was responsible for copyrighted videos uploaded by users and ordered the video website to install filters to detect when a user tries to upload such a video. Last week, the German Federal Court ruled that hosting service RapidShare was held liable for secondary copyright infringement. RapidShare was also required to take measures, including filtering, to prevent users to upload an Atari video game. The last word has not been said yet about the liability of intermediaries.
The decision of the French Court can be found here.
Read more about liability of intermediaries on FutureOfCopyright.com:
Source: The Register
Comments(0)
Your comment