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The Free Speech Blog: Official blog of Index on Censorship » Google convictions: Who should police the internet?

26 February 2010 – by Joe McNamee

The Italian court’s decision in the Google/Vividown case is as incomprehensible as it is disturbing. Unfortunately, as the full ruling will not be made available for some time, we can only guess at the specifics of the court’s decision.

The three Google executives, rather than the company itself, were held criminally responsible for breaches of Italy’s data protection laws. The convictions could have been based on Google’s role as the provider of a ‘hosting’ service for videos or, secondly, with regard to the privacy of the individuals in the video.

Providers of hosting services may not, following an EU Directive of 2000, be held liable if they expeditiously remove material upon receipt of a notice that material is illegal. While there is some debate about when the item was actually taken offline, prosecutors argued Google ‘should have’ known about the video and that the internet giant should never have allowed the video to be uploaded. It seems both legally and logically implausible to argue that internet service providers of any type should live in a legal limbo, carrying out surveillance of their users based on a court’s belief they ‘should have known’.

On the second issue, the privacy of the boy victimised in the video, it seems difficult to see how credible the prosecutions evidence could have been as the Italian data protection authority did not support this case. In either scenario it seems very unlikely that the court decision was legally sound but the decision is part of a wider and profoundly dangerous trend in Italy with regard to freedom of communication, privacy and expression.

* Italy already has internet filtering laws that are almost certainly in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights.
* In January 2010, the Italian government proposed measures for prior checks of all content to be placed on video hosting site, blogs and news media.
* Media freedom in Italy continues to decline according to Freedom House, who registered a further deterioration in the country in its most recent report.

In such a context, the ‘chilling effect’ of this judgement could be far-reaching. In an environment where the providers of online services have little or no legal certainty, the only realistic option would appear to be to err on the side of caution and censorship and many journalists and commentators seem to be taking the line of least resistance.

But in concert with the Italian government’s pre-existing plans to monitor all internet uploads this case could threaten user-generated content.

When legislation was proposed to outlaw anonymity online in order ‘to fight paedophiles’ it was quickly revealed that document was secretly authored by Univideo, the Italian union for the movie industry. So was the Union’s concern really child abuse or was it copyright?

Unfortunately, the situation in Italy appears to be a sign of the future rather than an isolated case. The European Commission is in discussions with industry ‘stakeholders’ about how to police the internet more efficiently for intellectual property infringements. The United States for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) proposes that internet providers put ‘measures’ in place to prevent infringements in order to avoid secondary liability for transgressions of their clients and the European Commission is also soon due to publish proposals for internet blocking. But don’t worry, its just to protect children; nothing sinister!

Joe McNamee works as Advocacy Coordinatory for European Digital Rights in Brussels (EDRi). He works on issues related to privacy, cybercrime, intellectual property, freedom of information/communication and related topics.

Google convictions reveal two flaws in EU law, not just Italian law: “OPINION: Criticism of last week’s conviction of three Google executives has focused on Italy’s legal system. That focus risks missing a wider point. Web hosts are unfairly exposed all across the EU and two legal changes are needed.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Serious threat to the web in Italy: “Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel – Europe, Middle East and Africa

(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

(Via Google Public Policy Blog.)

Google Video and Italy: Is there nothing we won’t watch? – Telegraph:

Google Video and Italy: Is there nothing we won’t watch?
Following Google’s conviction in Italy, Robert Colvile suggests that internet users hold the key to controlling inappropriate content.

By Robert Colvile
Published: 7:57AM GMT 26 Feb 2010

On September 8 2006, a new item was added to Google Video in Italy. It showed an autistic schoolboy in Turin being abused, physically and verbally, by his classmates. On Wednesday, three executives from Google – who had never worked in Italy, or had any idea of the video’s existence before it was deleted two months later – were found guilty (in absentia) of invading the teenager’s privacy, and given six-month suspended sentences by an Italian court, after charges were brought by a local Down’s syndrome charity.

The outrage was immediate. David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, and one of those convicted, claimed the ruling ‘poses a grave danger to the continued freedom and operation of the many internet services that users around the world – including many Italians – have come to rely on’. A coalition of supporters was quickly assembled ahead of the inevitable appeal, including Index on Censorship, Reporters Without Borders, and the US government.

Why the fuss? Everyone agrees that the video was unacceptable and disgusting. The prosecutors argued that Google had a duty to ensure that such videos complied with privacy law before they were made public, that comments beneath the video suggesting that it was inappropriate were ignored, and that it should have been spotted when it made the ‘most viewed’ list on the site.

Google countered that it took the video down within three hours of being alerted by the authorities, that European (and Italian) law states that responsibility for such videos lies with those who post them, and that taking a random set of executives from its hierarchy to court was hardly the way to resolve the issue.

Whatever the merits of the case, there is a broader point. It is not just that this ruling implies that Google – or anyone else who operates a website – is responsible for every offensive video, photo or comment that appears there. It is that this is only the latest of a seemingly endless series of instances in which the internet has been used to spread misery.

In Canada, for example, a video of an obese child miming a lightsaber fight – the so-called ‘Star Wars Kid’ – attracted millions of views and made his life a misery (in this case, the teenager, Ghyslain Raza, sued the classmates who put the video online, rather than the firms who hosted it). In Italy, Facebook groups have been removed for advocating the assassination of Silvio Berlusconi, or the use of children with Down’s syndrome for target practice – ‘an easy and amusing solution’ for disposing of ‘these foul creatures’. And an inquest heard this week that Emma Jones, a British teacher in Abu Dhabi, drank cleaning fluid – either deliberately or accidentally – after becoming panicked that naked photographs of her had been posted online, which could have led to her being condemned as a prostitute.

Faced with this kind of unpleasant material, the layman might ask why it can’t just be blocked before it is uploaded, as the Italian court wants. There are two objections, one philosophical and one practical. The first is whether we want internet companies to have the power to decide what is tasteful or ethical. Everyone would agree that child pornography should be removed from Google’s search database and the perpetrators brought to trial. But what when Apple decides – as it recently has – that it does not want ‘titillating’ content on its online store? Who decides what meets that vague guideline and what doesn’t?

It is the practical objection, however, that is most significant. YouTube, the video service bought by Google in 2006, receives 20 hours of video every single minute – a torrent of information that no human being could reasonably pre-screen. It is not just video, either. Bill Eggers, the global director of Deloitte Research, points out that it took the Library of Congress more than 200 years to amass a collection of 29 million books and periodicals, 2.4 million audio recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps and 57 million manuscripts. The same amount of data is now being added to the internet every five minutes.

Google, of course, has built its success on making sense of this chaos. It is the firm’s proudest boast that no human hand governs the placement of search results on your screen – it is all down to the ‘algorithm’, the impossibly complex formula that runs the site. So committed is Google to this idea that it refused to remove a racist image of Michelle Obama that was ranking highly from its image search function, arguing that the image was perfectly legal and its high placement reflected the reality of what people were linking to and interested in.

This is also why the fact that the European Commission is investigating Google over its search results – as disclosed in The Daily Telegraph this week – is about far more than the threat of billions of dollars in fines. If it is true that companies Google disapproves of, or is threatened by, are pushed down its rankings then it would destroy the belief – almost an article of faith within the firm – that its algorithm is the most perfect, and most objective, way yet found to make sense of the world’s information.

However, when it comes to screening out inappropriate content, even the mighty Google falls short. After YouTube in particular was criticised for relying on content pirated from elsewhere, such as TV shows or music videos, the firm developed a system called ‘Google Content ID’. This compares YouTube videos with copyrighted material in Google’s database and lets its creators decide whether to block the pirated material or impose their own advertising on it (a far more popular option). But the system is not yet sophisticated enough to tell when a video is displaying inappropriate content, such as pornography or racist diatribes. Nor can Google rely on the ‘tags’ people use to identify their content: a video marked ‘hot sex’ or ‘Britney Spears naked’ can often turn out to be footage of a cat on a piano, which has been mislabelled to drive up traffic.

The only practical solution, then, is for users to alert companies such as Google and Facebook to inappropriate material being hosted on their sites. And here is where things become even more disturbing. Think back to that video from Turin. Here was a disabled child being mocked and beaten by other pupils – a repulsive spectacle. Yet it still became one of the most viewed items on the site. And even though some of those thousands who watched it posted comments underneath suggesting it was inappropriate, Google insists that not a single one bothered to click on the button, displayed on every video, that would alert it to the existence of inappropriate content.

In other words, Google, Facebook and the like are at the mercy of human nature. They can act when there have been clear-cut breaches of laws or standards, such as pornography on YouTube, or Facebook groups that advocate the murder of the disabled, or profile pictures that display Nazi regalia (if that is illegal in the relevant country). But they can do less about people’s instinctive tendency towards voyeurism or cruelty – hence the estimates that a fifth of the pupils in Britain’s schools and a seventh of the teachers have become the victims of some form of ‘cyber-bullying’.

‘Wherever like-minded people gather into a mob, you can bid farewell to nuance, empathy or good manners,’ wrote the Sunday Telegraph columnist Jemima Lewis recently, recalling the ‘astonishing rudeness’ with which dissenters from parenting orthodoxy are treated on the Mumsnet website. One mother who expressed dismay that her daughter’s primary school had been discussing lesbianism and civil partnerships was told she was ‘homophobic’, a ‘d—head’ and to ‘Go and live with the Amish if you can’t deal with the real world.’

Executives at Facebook believe this kind of behaviour will dwindle as people come to use their real names online (as they must do on its network), rather than hiding behind anonymity. But Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, thinks they should go further. ‘I understand that it’s very difficult, if you want a quick and speedy and free internet, to say there must be massive obligations on companies to vet things before they go up. But they could go a lot further than they currently are, in terms of taking their responsibilities to educate and warn people more seriously.’

Ultimately, however, it comes down to how we behave. ‘People can be thoughtless, people can be reckless, people can be hurtful, and the web, despite being wonderful in all sorts of ways, is a new – and in some ways more dangerous – medium for that,’ says Chakrabarti.

‘It’s fashionable to bang on about a Big Brother state, but we’re all capable of being pretty nasty little brothers and sisters to each other as well.’

Does Italy’s Google Conviction Portend More Censorship? | Threat Level | Wired.com: “Does Italy’s Google Conviction Portend More Censorship?

By Ryan Singel, February 24, 2010

googleitaliaOnline rights activists are divided Wednesday over an Italian court’s guilty verdicts against Google executives who were convicted on privacy charges for not blocking a video that made fun of a child with Down syndrome. All agree the controversial ruling runs counter to longstanding U.S. and E.U. ‘safe harbor’ laws immunizing online service providers for what users do — but the activists are mixed over what the decision means and how much importance should be place on it.

Leslie Harris, the president of the influential Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology, argued the ruling would be used by authoritarian regimes to justify their own web censorship.

‘Today’s stunning verdict sets an extremely dangerous precedent that threatens free expression and chills innovation on the global internet,’ Harris said in an e-mail statement. ‘If the conviction is allowed to stand, it will chill the provision of Web 2.0 services that provide user-generated content platforms in Italy, and Italian internet users will find themselves without a powerful forum for free expression.

‘Most troubling, what happened in Italy is unlikely to stay in Italy. The Italian court’s actions today will surely embolden authoritarian regimes and be used to justify their own efforts to suppress internet freedom.’

Chief among the concerns is that nations might turn to using criminal laws or threats of criminal prosecutions to force companies to bend to the their political will.

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation shares Harris’ concern for online rights.

‘The threat to internet free speech from nations around the world that don’t have the same laws and attitudes about free speech is absolutely a constant problem and is getting worse,’ Tien said.

But he warned against placing too much emphasis on this case, which many see as thinly veiled machinations against Google by Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has nearly monopoly control over Italy’s mainstream media. Italy’s parliament is currently considering a law that would put online video services under the same rules imposed on broadcast stations — legislation intended to stifle online speech.

But the Google case will drag on in appeals for years and it’s not clear it will be anything more than a legal anomaly.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of real and sticky issues around hate speech and pornography — where people have legitimate issues and real public policy has to be worked out, according to Tien.

‘I’d prefer people to think about those cases and not focus on show cases,’ he said.

Google, for one, called the decision ‘astonishing.’

‘It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the internet is built,’ Google lawyer Matt Sucherman wrote on Google’s blog. ‘If that ’safe harbor’ principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.’

And while it might be tempting for some to dismiss the suit as the work of a crazy Italian justice system, the United States is no stranger to politically motivated legal attacks on free speech and internet freedom.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles prosecuted and convicted a Missouri woman on hacking charges for helping put up a fake MySpace profile to harass a neighbor’s teenage daughter, who later committed suicide. The judge in the case overturned Lori Drew’s conviction. He found the government’s contention that violating a website’s terms of service was the same as hacking ‘unconstitutional.’

And in South Carolina, the Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened to criminally prosecute Craigslist management if the classified listings site didn’t remove its erotic listings category, saying the site was promoting prostitution. A federal judge had to order McMaster to stop his threats.

The Italy decision won’t be published in full for several weeks and will likely be on appeal for years. None of those convicted will likely ever serve their six months of jail time, in no small part since they all live outside of Italy. The video at issue appeared in 2006, on Google Video, a service now replaced by YouTube.

University of Virgina media studies and law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, meanwhile, sees the Italian case as a very local issue rooted in Italian politics and a sign that Google’s culture of audacious enterprises isn’t as welcome outside the Unite States as it hoped it would be.

‘The government in Italy wants to hold Google down in Italy until it says ‘uncle’ for a while,’ Vaidhyanathan said. ‘But it does say a lot about the fact that the globalization of Google is not going well. The ruling comes as cyberliberties are in flux globally and Google is trying to maintain revenues in countries like Egypt and Russia.’

Vaidhyanathan, whose upcoming book The Googlization of Everything tackles the subject of Google as a worldwide cultural force, says that the net’s and Google’s method of doing things first and letting people opt out later is proving to be not a hit everywhere around the globe.

‘Google is finding that getting beyond America is difficult,’ sad Vaidhyanathan, referring to Google’s hacking showdown in China, privacy issues with its Street View mapping cameras in Germany, and the censorship demands placed on it by China, Turkey, Thailand, Argentina and India.

‘I can see the general objection to Google’s way of doing things,’ said Vaidhyanathan. ‘It’s default setting is that it can do whatever it wants and if you have a problem, just let them know, and that opt-out model is not applicable in every case.’

To others, like Tien, the ruling is simply baffling. Clearly, Italy doesn’t want its own service providers to have to meet the burden of approving every forum posting, blog comment or uploaded video — and punishing executives when their companies miss the mark — as was the case of the Google executives in Italy.

That’s akin to making automobile executives personally liable in any automobile accident related to the company’s sticky pedal woes.

Tien said that would be a ‘massive extension of liability.’

Leading article: Not the way to police the web’s Wild West – Leading Articles, Opinion – The Independent: “Leading article: Not the way to police the web’s Wild West

Thursday, 25 February 2010

In some ways, the internet has been like another Pandora’s Box which has unleashed new furies on the world, from online child pornography rings to cyber bullying. The case of four students in Italy who filmed themselves victimising an autistic child and posted their taunts online is the latest example of the ways in which the web facilitates cruelty.

Human vindictiveness and depravity are nothing new, of course. The difference is that now this kind of vile behaviour can be shared among millions with a video phone, an internet connection and a few mouse clicks.

The question is: how should the authorities respond? An Italian court has come up with one answer by imposing a suspended jail sentence on three Google executives, on to whose site the clip was uploaded. Alas, this is unlikely to be a practical solution.

One might sympathise with the judgment of Judge Oscar Magi. By holding the most powerful player in the internet to account in this fashion, the court has sent an electrifying message to all websites that they need to be careful about what they allow to be posted; that grossly cruel or nakedly defamatory material will not be tolerated.

But if website hosts are going to be held legally responsible for everything that goes up online, the danger is that they will begin censoring text, images, videos, indeed every kind of contribution from the public, on the precautionary principle. That would be a deeply regressive curb on the freedom of the web.

Those who argue that the internet will always be like the Wild West, with no standards of conduct or decency, are being too pessimistic. Powerful web hosts can – and should – do more to make their sites civilised spaces. But threatening the employees of such organisations with jail is no way to advance this cause.

Google guilty of privacy crime in web test case – Europe, World – The Independent: “Google guilty of privacy crime in web test case

Three executives convicted in Italy after school bullying video was uploaded

By Michael Day in milan and Robert Verkaik

Thursday, 25 February 2010

Three Google executives were convicted yesterday in a landmark privacy case that critics said could severely curtail internet freedom.

In what privacy experts described as a ‘chilling ruling’, a judge in Milan imposed suspended prison sentences on the men who he said were criminally liable for allowing the posting of a clip on Google’s video service which featured the bullying of an autistic child.

Google’s senior vice-president and chief legal officer, David Drummond, the former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes and global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, were all found guilty of violating the boy’s privacy. The senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted. Legal experts said the case had worrying implications for all internet service providers and other hosting platforms which do not create their own content such as YouTube and Facebook.

During the trial the prosecutors accused Google of negligence, saying the video remained online for two months, even though web users had already posted comments asking for it to be removed. But Google argued that it had complied with the law by taking it down when contacted by the Italian authorities and assisted prosecutors in bringing those responsible to court.

In recent months the censorship of Italian websites has become a controversial issue following a spate of hate sites against officials, including the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

But some experts fear that the case could have much broader implications. Last night Richard Thomas, the former Information Commissioner and consultant to the privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, told The Independent that the case was of grave concern to both internet users and service providers.

‘Whether it is a one-off case or precedent-setting ruling, it will send reverberations around the whole world,’ he said. ‘This ruling is simply inconsistent with the way the internet works. There is no UK data law or European law that I know which could lead to this result, where employees of a company are sentenced to suspended jail sentences for being personally criminally liable for the uploading of a video clip in this way.’

Andy Millmore, head of litigation at the media and entertainment law firm Harbottle & Lewis, said: ‘This ruling has major implications for internet service providers, potentially making them automatically liable for the first time for what others post on sites they own. If upheld, it will make it theoretically possible to pursue sites for hosting content which has not been posted with the express permission of the people featured.’

The case arose in late 2006 when students at a school in Turin filmed and then uploaded a video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The complaint was brought by the boy’s father with an Italian advocacy group for people with Down’s syndrome, Vivi Down, although the boy had autism, not Down’s.

The Italian public prosecutor greeted the verdict as a victory for individuals over corporations. ‘A company’s rights cannot prevail over a person’s dignity. This sentence sends a clear signal,’ the lawyer Alfredo Robledo said outside the Milan courthouse.

Last night Google said it hoped to overturn the verdicts on appeal, while the convicted executives issued their own statements. Mr Drummond said that the verdict set a ‘dangerous precedent’.

The complaints of the Google executives are likely to fall on deaf ears in Italy, however. Sympathy for the victim was already running high this week following the emergence of an Italian group on Facebook calling for children with Down’s syndrome be used for ‘target practice’.

The Equal Opportunities minister, Mara Carfagna, said: ‘Italy will not tolerate incidents of discrimination of any sort, let alone against the disabled,’ and added: ‘Those responsible for creating this idiocy will be prosecuted.’ Facebook operators in the US shut the group down soon after.

The model: How it makes $23.6bn

* An analyst once described Google as an advertising business which has a good line in search results. Revenues hit $23.6bn in 2009, with 97 per cent coming from advertising. Every time there is a search on its site, an almost instantaneous auction is carried out, with an advertiser paying from a few cents to tens of dollars. Google’s algorithms then place the adverts on its site.

* Most of this is done through AdWords, Google’s ad system, which allows any company to create adverts at a low cost and make sure those adverts are tied to certain keywords. When those words are typed in, the company’s advert will run next to the search results.

* The rest of Google’s advertising revenues come from AdSense, which sells adverts on third-party sites. Of the 3 per cent of revenues not generated from ads, most come from providing branded email systems and other corporate tools to companies.

Italy’s harmful conviction of Google – Los Angeles Times: “Editorial

February 24, 2010

In September 2006, four students at a school in Turin, Italy, beat and humiliated an autistic classmate. A fifth student captured the incident on her cellphone camera, then posted the digital footage to Google Video. It spent two months as one of the site’s most popular clips before Google took it down at the request of Italian police.

The attackers were convicted and ordered to perform 10 months of community service; the girl who recorded the beating was convicted too, and given a similar penalty. But that wasn’t enough for Italian authorities. On Wednesday, a court in Milan convicted three Google executives of violating the victim’s privacy and sentenced them to six months in jail. Judge Oscar Magi suspended the sentence and imposed no financial penalty, so the conviction has little practical effect on the three executives. The implications for the Internet, however, are enormous and chilling.

One reason the Internet is so transformative is that companies such as Google have built platforms that anyone can use to distribute works and products. They radically lower the barriers to entry into the markets for information and entertainment, promoting both speech and commerce. That’s in sharp contrast to traditional media companies, which typically exist to publish or broadcast just the works in the portfolios they control. But because some of the new online platforms don’t screen material before it’s exposed to the public, bad things inevitably happen.

The choice, though, is between a system that pushes online companies to respond quickly and fairly to complaints about videos after they’re posted, and one that compels them to become gatekeepers. Lawmakers in the U.S. and the European Union have opted, correctly, for the former approach. But there has been growing pressure from a variety of aggrieved parties — companies and individuals claiming to have been defamed or bullied, entertainment conglomerates and luxury brands fighting piracy — to force the Googles of the world to police their sites and block disputed material before it draws a complaint, or even before it’s posted. Magi’s ruling, unfortunately, is a victory for that side. It could prevent start-ups with open platforms from competing with the likes of Google (and Facebook and EBay) while forcing the incumbents to reduce the flow of material onto their sites.

By convicting Google executives for violating privacy with a video they did not make or post online, Magi undermined the message that prosecutors sent to the youths who did. The right lesson should have been that the Internet gives people great power, and those who misuse it will bear the responsibility — all of it.

AFP: Outrage in Italy over anti-Down Syndrome website

(AFP) –22 February, 2010

ROME — Politicians and Internet activists in Italy have denounced a page on the social networking site Facebook that calls for children with Down Syndrome to be used for target practice.

Police were trying to track down who set up the page, which features a photo of a Down Syndrome baby with the word ‘idiot’ superimposed on it, and by late Sunday had attracted nearly 1,700 members.

The page proposed what it said was ‘an easy and amusing solution’ to get rid of ‘these foul creatures’: use them as targets at shooting centres.

Equality minister Mara Carfagna, promising legal action against those responsible for the page, denouncing it as ‘unacceptable and dangerous.’

A number of rival groups have already been set up on Facebook to denounce the original page, one of which had attracted more than 17,000 members.

‘People’s ignorance has no limits,’ Manuela Colombo, the president of a support group for families with Down Syndrome children told ANSA news agency.

Police action to get the site shut down might take some time according to some experts, because Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California, and the procedure might entail a lengthy legal process.

One baby in 1,200 is born with Down Sydrome in Italy and there are 38,000 with the condition living there, 61 percent of whom are older than 25 years, according to figures cited by the Italian Down Syndrome Association, ANSA reported.

Italy Convicts Google Execs for Down Syndrome Video

By Reuters, February 24, 2010

MILAN (Reuters) — A Milan court convicted three Google executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with Down syndrome by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.

Google will appeal the six-month suspended jail terms and said the verdict ‘poses a crucial question for the freedom on which the internet is built,’ since none of the three employees found guilty had anything to do with the offending video.

‘They didn’t upload it, they didn’t film it, they didn’t review it and yet they have been found guilty,’ said Google’s senior communications manager, Bill Echikson, in Milan.

The court convicted senior vice-president and chief legal officer David Drummond, former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted.

The executives, none of whom are based in Italy, do not face actual imprisonment as the sentences were suspended, while an appeals process in Italy can take many years.
The guilty verdict ‘poses a crucial question for the freedom on which the internet is built,’ Google asserts.

They were not in Italy for the hearing. Drummond is based in California, Fleischer in Paris and Desikan in London, while De Los Reyes has since retired, Echikson told Reuters.

The complaint was brought by an Italian advocacy group for people with Down syndrome, Vivi Down, and the boy’s father, after four classmates at a Turin school uploaded a clip to Google Video showing them bullying the boy.

‘A company’s rights cannot prevail over a person’s dignity. This sentence sends a clear signal,’ public prosecutor Alfredo Robledo told reporters outside the Milan courthouse.

Down syndrome is the most common genetic cause of mental retardation, occurring in about 1 out of 700 live births.

The video was filmed with a mobile phone and posted on the site in September 2006.

‘Threat To Net Freedom’

Google argued that it removed the video immediately after being notified and cooperated with Italian authorities to help identify the bullies and bring them to justice.

It says that, as hosting platforms that do not create their own content, Google Video, YouTube and Facebook cannot be held responsible for content that others upload.

Drummond said in a statement the verdict ‘sets a dangerous precedent’ and meant ‘every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability.’ He said the law was clear in Italy and the European Union that ‘hosting providers like Google are not required to monitor content that they host.’

Leslie Harris, the president of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology said the ruling was an ‘extremely dangerous precedent.’

‘This is precisely the sort of action by a Western democracy that undermines Secretary Clinton’s call for global internet freedom,’ Harris said. ‘The principle that technological intermediaries should be protected from liability for content posted by users has been a cornerstone of Internet freedom. It is enshrined in both E.U. and U.S. law.

‘Most troubling, what happened it Italy is unlikely to stay in Italy. The Italian court’s actions today will surely embolden authoritarian regimes and be used justify their own efforts to suppress internet freedom.’

Fleischer said if employees were ‘criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the video in question, then our liability is unlimited.’

The prosecutors accused Google of negligence, saying the video remained online for two months even though some web users had already posted comments asking for it to be taken down.

Down syndrome support group Vivi Down said in a statement that it was ‘very satisfied’ with the guilty verdict.

Censoring of websites has become a hot issue in Italy in recent months, following a spate of hate sites against officials including Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The government briefly studied plans to black out internet hate sites after fan pages emerged praising an attack on the premier, but the idea was dropped after executives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft agreed to a shared code of conduct rather than legislation.

(By Manuela D’Alessandro. Additional reporting by Emilio Parodi and Eleanor Biles; writing by Stephen Brown in Rome; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton. Additional reporting by Ryan Singel.)