Serious threat to the web in Italy

First decision in the Italian criminal case against Google executives
(from EDRi-gram newsletter, contribution by Andrea Monti - EDRi-member ALCEI Italy)
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Today, 24 February 2010, the Court of Milan made public the decision in the criminal trial against four Google executives, charged of defamation and illegal personal data handling in relationship to the publication on the video sharing platform of a video containing act of bullyism against a person affected by the Down Syndrome.

The legal basis for the charges, following the prosecutor's theory of the case, was that those executives failed to exercise a pre-emptive control over the contents published by Google final users', thus allowing the infringement of the reputation of the concerned person and of an NGO representing Down-Syndrome-affected persons.

The Court acquitted all the defendant from the charges of defamation, while found them liable of the illegal personal data handling charge. The whole sentence (including the legal technicalities that support the decision) will be public within the next 30 days.

The legal oddity of the prosecutor strategy is this:
1 - there is a rule of law that says: to not stop a fact means to cause it,
2 - data protection law requires a prior authorization to be obtained before handling personal data,
3 - a video to be posted online is personal data,
4 - therefore Google executives had to check whether the user who posted the video got the preemptive authorisation from the people of the video, and
5 - by failing to do so, they infringed the data protection law
6 - furthermore, by not controlling in advance they let the video to libel the victim of the violence (this charge has been dismissed.)

The consequence is that under this (odd) interpretation of data protection law, every Internet Service Provider is requested to infringe its user privacy, to do a prior check on the legitimacy of the action performed by the users themselves.

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Official Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/serious-threat-to-web-in-italy.html
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Read about free speech on the Internet at: http://www.mysecurecyberspace.com/articles/features/free-speech-and-the-internet.html#msc.article.feature.freespeech