BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
September 11, 2013
Google Sued in Europe-Privacy Test Case.
Max Mosley Wants Search Results Showing Sexual Escapade Scrubbed
Source: Online.wsj.com. - The Wall Street Journal - USA
PARIS - A sadomasochistic sex party is the latest battlefield in the Web's privacy war.
Google was hauled into a French court Wednesday by former Formula One racing head Max Mosley, who wants the Internet giant to scrub its search results of grainy images of a sexual escapade. The images were found to be a privacy breach by a U.K. court, only to pop up elsewhere online.
The case is the latest in a series brought by Mr. Mosley and others that test the limits of what individuals can do to control information that appears about them on the Internet.
As Europe considers tougher new privacy rules that could contain a "right to be forgotten," the cases could help determine the balance between privacy and censorship in an era of pervasive social-media and government surveillance.
Mr. Mosley's case stretches back to 2008, when News Corp's NWSA defunct News of the World published details and hidden-camera footage of a role-playing romp featuring Mr. Mosley and five women that the weekly tabloid described as a "sick Nazi orgy." (News Corp owns The Wall Street Journal.)
Mr. Mosley, who admitted the sexual activity but denied the Nazi theme, sued News of the World for invasion of privacy, winning a £60,000 award from a U.K. court, which said there was "no evidence" of any Nazi theme. The newspaper was also hit with a smaller fine in French court.
Now Mr. Mosley is pushing his case further: He has filed suits against Google in both France and Germany, looking to force the American company to use automatic filters that eliminate any thumbnail images of the video, as well as links to it in Google's search results.
"Google is perpetuating not only the spread of these illegal images but it is perpetuating the curiosity of Internet users," Clara Zerbib, a lawyer for Mr. Mosley, said in arguments Wednesday at the hearing in a wood-paneled courtroom in Paris's Palais de Justice.
Google, for its part, says that European Union rules don't require it to do any automatic filtering and that it removes offending search results with images of Mr. Mosley's party when it is given a specific link to deactivate. It argues that creating an automatic system would amount to a new form of censorship and would inevitably end up blocking news sites and legitimate parodies that may use the images or parts of them.
"You can't decide now that the context for these links will forever be illicit," Christophe Bigot, a lawyer for Google, told judges during Wednesday's three-hour hearing. "The balance between privacy and free expression is necessarily case by case."
The court said it would issue a decision, which would be subject to appeal, on Oct. 21.
Some legal momentum may be with Google. In June, one of the eight advocate generals for the European Union's highest court gave a preliminary opinion that government agencies can't force search engines like Google to remove links to personal material.
The court, which usually follows advocate-general opinions, is considering whether Spain's privacy regulator overstepped European rules when trying to force Google to remove unflattering search results for scores of residents-such as a doctor who claimed that links to a 1991 news article about a dispute with a patient had hurt his business.
Some public-interest groups have been supporting Google as well. "Forcing Google and other search engines to filter results would lead to censorship of legitimate information," Index on Censorship, a nonprofit group, said in an emailed statement.
But the EU is in the midst of thrashing out a new continent-wide update of privacy rules that could change the playing field. Some privacy advocates are pushing for the bloc to adopt a new "right to be forgotten" aimed at letting individuals suppress personal information on privacy grounds.
For his part, Mr. Mosley recognizes the potential futility of mounting a high-profile lawsuit to suppress Internet search-engine results.
"If you bring a case like this, a lot of people will then will look for whatever it is you're suing about," Mr. Mosley said by phone after the hearing. "But that's the price you pay."
See larger photo on:
online.wsj.com.
