Google Off the Libel Hook

Score one for search engines everywhere. Officials with the British company Metropolitan International Schools, which offers vocational training conducted over the Internet, discovered that whenever someone in the United Kingdom searched for their business on Google, up popped comments from a reader at a tech news Web site—comments that were decidedly uncharitable toward the company and its practices. So it did what every red-blooded Englishman would do: It sued Google (GOOG) for libel, betting that the country's notoriously tough libel laws would net them a sweet payoff.

Indeed, Britain's libel statutes are remarkably stringent; neocon intellectual Richard Perle once famously threatened to use British courts to sue Seymour Hersh for a critical story that appeared in The New Yorker, in the most transparent case of venue-shopping we've seen in a while. But in a ruling that will warm the hearts of Internet service providers everywhere, High Court Judge David Eady ruled that because Google didn't actually publish the content, it can't be held liable for the defamatory remarks. According to the New York Times, Eady wrote that Google "has merely, by the provision of its search service, played the role of a facilitator."

Information Week's Thomas Claburn points out that this is just the latest in a string of European libel suits Google has beaten back; courts in France and Spain have dismissed similar lawsuits in the last few months. But Italy's legal action against Google, in which four company executives are being pursued after someone posted a YouTube video of teenagers mocking a disabled child, is still proceeding apace.

Speaking of YouTube, Google has one or two more public relations problems to work through in Britain. The latest comes courtesy of British musician Calvin Harris, who set up a YouTube account and posted videos of his songs on the Web site. But the music-industry trade organization BPI filed a copyright complaint with YouTube, and the site apparently purged one of Harris' songs from his own account without notifying him or getting to the truth of the matter. This has prompted Harris to unleash a string of furious Twitter posts, which were picked up by TechCrunch. "It's my fucking song you absolute bastards," reads one. TechCrunch suggests that in the U.K., rival music labels have adopted the practice of filing spurious copyright complaints at one another, in the hope of manipulating the Google bots into deleting the original material of their sworn enemies. Poor Google is once again caught in the middle.