BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — More than 100 Argentine celebrities have filed lawsuits against Google and Yahoo over search results that display their names as links to porn. The 114 performers and sports personalities say the content to which the links point is defamatory and should be blocked by the search engines.As a result, Yahoo has censored links that that appear on Yahoo.com.ar — the version of the search engine localized for Argentina — but the complete list appears on the main Yahoo site. The message Argentine surfers see reads “We have been obliged temporarily to suspend some or all of the results related to this search.”
The celebrities and their attorney claim the websites in question never would have become popular if they hadn’t used the stars’ names illicitly and without permission. The search engines, therefore, have a legal and moral responsibility to censor their results.
“The key to the question is that if these search engines didn’t exist, no one would know these sites,” Martín Leguizamón Peña, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told London’s Financial Times. “[The search engines] know everything they are putting up there and, as such, they are as responsible as the people who put together the content.”
Google has not changed the way it displays search results and says it has no plans to do so. The company feels the lawsuits, some of which seek monetary damages, amount to nothing more than a censorship bid. The search engine does block some content in countries where the content is illegal — like links to Nazi memorabilia in Germany and certain social and political material in China — but a spokesman said otherwise, people who feel they’ve been wronged by a website need to approach the website directly. Google is only an intermediary, and as such, it is protected by law in most places.
“We will gladly remove a link if it violates the law, but we can’t act as a censor of a whole host of information which is legal,” Google spokesman Alberto Arébalos told the Financial Times.
Free speech advocates are on the side of the search engines.
“Citizens need to be protected, not from Google but from sites that are potentially slandering them,” Nart Villeneuve of Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto-based internet censorship institute, told the Financial Times. “People could be writing blogs alleging all sorts of things, and it’s not Google’s responsibility to go and determine the legality.”
London attorney Paul Gershlick agreed, but added that not every country has passed laws to protect the free exchange of information on the Web.
“European law has exemptions from liability for intermediaries like Yahoo and Google, so [lawsuits like the ones in Argentina] couldn’t happen in the UK,” he told the Financial Times. “But in Argentina they don’t have such laws.”
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and federal telecommunications laws in the U.S. also shield search engines from responsibility when displaying information pulled from other sources or submitted by users. Most American attorneys who practice in the area of First Amendment law have indicated that in-house attempts to edit or otherwise control the information that appears on internet service providers’ pages could destroy the shields under which search engines and other ISPs operate. However, service providers are required to remove content that violates copyright or trademarks or otherwise defames private individuals upon receipt of a take-down notice submitted via the proper channels.
