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Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

abc.net.au

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Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#151

Post by Retric »

fastball wrote: post #142
Retric wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So as is often the case the details are what matter. Google failed to remove defamatory content from their systems after being informed it was defamatory. That’s the case, and they lost because it’s their responsibility to respect such notifications. It’s like that hot coffee lawsuit. They were held 80% liable because the coffee was served at a seriously unsafe temperature, which isn’t total liability. She got 3rd de…

I think the thing people are surprised by is that auto-complete searches count as defamation, not that Google didn't take them down.

A distinction is this wasn’t automated once a human looked at the complaint.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#152

Post by rescbr »

jeroenhd wrote: post #95
arp242 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting messages and making up that a friend's wife committed suicide is not really "stalking" or "persistently and obsessively harassing". Immoral and possibly illegal? Perhaps. But that's not the same thing. Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba. I think the crux of the matter is: even if you did something wrong, do things like that really need to be preserved on the internet under your real name for the rest of yo…

> Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba. Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered, so I'm not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a "rip-off". If someone tells you they'll talk to your dead ancestors for money and you don't believe them, who's to say who's speaking the truth? The best you can do is use reasoning like "there's no scient…

> It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered

Ah! You totally can! Every now and them there are news articles about lawsuits against the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#153

Post by almostnormal »

Zambyte wrote: post #121
almostnormal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of human workers to process the requests definitively must scale with the requests. What may be desirable is cases where cost does not scale with revenue. But that should be no guarantee for long-term gains, because it provides room for competition that could make a cheaper offer at the same internal cost.

Gonna be real with you, I have no idea what you mean. My point in asking was that scaling Google to infinity might in fact not be a good thing.

I agree with you.

Just the use of "scaling" seemed a bit too narrow.

Produce x pieces and earn y. Produce 1000 times x pieces and earn 1000 times y. That's scaling in the traditional sense. "Everything" (+/-) scales.

Produce once at fixed cost and earn infinite - that's something beyond just scaling. Maybe leverage? If it would provide the same quality and lower prices it would be good for society. If prices stay high and there is an indirect cost in degraded quality for the sake of huge gains something might not be right.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#154

Post by _trampeltier »

sdfghswe wrote: post #136
_trampeltier wrote: post #134

And the court needed 12 years for this? Really?

My rudimentary understanding of law is that there are a lot of "procedural" elements that expensive lawyers can fiddle with in order to delay the case (and try to make the plaintiff give up). It's not necessarily that the decision was conceptually difficult. Altho it might be! I don't know anything about the case.

Yes, but please. If the law/court works like this .. thats almost worthless.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#155

Post by tadfisher »

jsnell wrote: post #132
soco wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The request process is indeed easy enough. Now, if you also expect it having results, guess what.

The GP's complaint was about not being able to notify Google at all, not at not getting the right outcome. I'm pretty sure submissions to that form will have (trained) human eyes on them after some trivial spam filtering, it's not just redirected to /dev/null. As for whether one could expect results, there are stats on how often this functionality is used in the EU (about 200k requests per year) and how often it is s…

Not correct, the original lawsuit (from 2015) was predicated on the fact that she had indeed opened a removal request, and Google denied it, saying they could do nothing without the cooperation of the website owner (RipoffReport).

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#156

Post by pixl97 »

Karellen wrote: post #127
gspencley wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered, so I'm not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a "rip-off". Well, I would suggest that both are a "rip off" in the sense that they offer claims without evidence. But a distinction that I see between religious services and psychics is that religious services are not offering financial transact…

> But the fact remains that a lot of people still believe. But also, a lot of people still believe in professional wrestling. Are pro wrestlers ripping people off? Were pro wrestlers ripping people off worse in the '80s and earlier, when they tried really hard to maintain kayfabe, including denying the existence of kayfabe? If you pay money to psychics and they tell you the sorts of things you paid them to tell you,…

Answers to things don't have to be black and white, yes or no. You can also start a process up front saying it's entertainment then manipulate people to the point the initial statement no longer holds.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#157

Post by tinus_hn »

donatj wrote: post #14

Going after Google rather than the company actually making the remarks seems… incorrect 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.

Seems the court disagrees with you to the tune of $100000.

Seems it is the opinion of the court that Google is rebroadcasting and amplifying slander and refuses to stop when notified and when ordered to do so.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#158

Post by anon84873628 »

testplzignore wrote: post #3

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.

The most interesting sequence of the decision to me:

>The Court reasoned that only once Google acquired knowledge of the paragraphs by reason of Dr Duffy’s notifications and failed to remove them within a reasonable time thereafter would the necessary mental element be present for Google to be a “secondary publisher”.

> ...

>The Court then turned to look at the notice given by Dr. Duffy, to ascertain whether it was sufficient to fix Google with the relevant mental element. The Court concluded that Dr Duffy’s communications with Google comprised adequate notification to them of the allegedly defamatory material, this was despite the fact that some of the URLs were incomplete in these communications. The Court also implied that a reasonable time for removal of content would be one month, which had not been met by Google.

>...

>The Court rejected Google’s defenses of innocent dissemination, qualified privilege, and justification (truth). In dismissing the innocent dissemination defense, which required that the publisher be a subordinate distributor who did not know or ought not to have known that the matter was defamatory, the Court stated that the defamatory nature of the content was self-evident from an examination of it.

Emphasis on the last line.

It's not like she had to go to Google and say, "here is a court judgment showing this content is defaming me" to have it removed. She simply had to notify Google that this "self-evident" defamatory content was being served by them.

That seems like a significant precedent to set. I don't really think it is fair to expect Google to determine which content is "self-evidently" defamatory (edit to add: amongst all the takedown requests they will receive)

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#159

Post by dhimes »

Retric wrote: post #92
KomoD wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried that with Google? Or are you just guessing?

Legally it counts as notification even if they never open the letter.

I'm not even sure it has to be registered. In at least one court case I know of (a local landlord case) the court assumed that a mailed letter was delivered properly.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#160

Post by TimPC »

anon84873628 wrote: post #158
testplzignore wrote: post #3

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.

The most interesting sequence of the decision to me: >The Court reasoned that only once Google acquired knowledge of the paragraphs by reason of Dr Duffy’s notifications and failed to remove them within a reasonable time thereafter would the necessary mental element be present for Google to be a “secondary publisher”. > ... >The Court then turned to look at the notice given by Dr. Duffy, to ascertain whether it was s…

I think it's a fair precedent. If Google feels the content is not defamatory they can take that position in court with consequences if they are wrong. The downside is this ends up like the DMCA where companies are likely to take down all content complained about because of the risk/reward tradeoffs but if we already do that for alleged copyright violations doing it for alleged defamation seems much more reasonable to me. They also don't have to remove all self-evidently defamatory content, just all self-evidently defamatory content they are notified they are serving.
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