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A person wrote articles that another person felt were defamatory, second person sued Google for indexing them.
Not a single scrap of information about the facts of the case. We should just infer that Google are evil and did something wrong that they deserve to pay for.
A person wrote articles that another person felt were defamatory, second person sued Google for indexing them.
yep, while I agree defamation is bad, I find the whole "publisher" argument somewhat obsolete. If everyone can be a publisher, then no one is.
Full Streisand. https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/janice-duffy-psychic-st...
Doesn’t seem like it should be Googles job to fact check the internet. Go after the liar, not the search engine.
Google seems no more responsible than your ISP for sending it to you or your monitor manufacturer for displaying it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yep, while I agree defamation is bad, I find the whole "publisher" argument somewhat obsolete. If everyone can be a publisher, then no one is.
The first party is not even the first party, since this "Ripoff Report" site is user-contributed content. It looks like this plaintiff and some American woman were shitposting on that site, and Google indexed it, and the Australian woman sued Google. Full Streisand. https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/janice-duffy-psychic-st...
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.
Personally, I don't easily see how Google could be liable for defamation here under any reasonable standard.
Their search services generally don't say the equivalent of "Bob murdered a woman in 1989".
Their search services generally say the equivalent of "Joe says that Bob murdered a woman in 1989".
If anybody is guilty of defamation in that contrived example, it's Joe.
Regardless of whether the story about Bob murdering somebody is true or false, Google's service remains entirely factual when they pass along the word that "Joe says that Bob murdered a woman in 1989". That statement is 100% factual.
I wish the article went into more detail about the actual impact on this woman's career (not sure if they risk lawsuits reporting the details), but as the posted article reads right now, it's not really clear if she was fired because of some boss Googling her, or if she just had a mental break when she fixated on the Google search results to a possibly unhealthy degree.
Not a single scrap of information about the facts of the case. We should just infer that Google are evil and did something wrong that they deserve to pay for.
As far as I can tell, the problem is that google surfaced posts claiming she was a stalker, when she merely lied about a psychic having caused her friend to commit suicide in posts about that psychic. Or something.
> […] because [Google] was on notice that the material was defamatory and refused to remove the information, it could not be found to have innocently circulated the information
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.
> Dr. Duffy became aware that when people searched her name on Google’s search engine, the Google search bar provided an autocomplete suggested search term of “janice duffy psychic stalker”. [...] Google was also found [by the court] to be the “publisher” of autocomplete suggestions that came up when a user began to type the individual’s name in its search bar
Be careful with your UI!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
nah she won and did a great service to her fellow human beings. this was not lost or wasted time. people spend decades on far more "useless" things - not that there is anything wrong with that
Indeed, society needs such people. Heroic, in a way.