SYDNEY—Australia’s highest court ruled that
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Google isn’t liable for defamatory content that can be accessed via a hyperlink in its search results, a win for Google in a jurisdiction that has at times taken a hard line against tech platforms.
The case involved a lawyer, George Defteros, who alleged that a Google search of his name returned a hyperlink to and a snippet of a newspaper article that was defamatory. Lower courts found that the article implied Mr. Defteros had become a friend of criminal elements, and that Google could be considered a publisher of the article because the search result was crucial to communicating its contents to end users, court documents said. Google was ordered to pay damages of 40,000 Australian dollars, equivalent to $28,100.
Google appealed, and on Wednesday the High Court of Australia ruled that it isn’t a publisher of the defamatory material and can’t be liable for it. Google merely facilitated access, a summary of the judgment said.
“A hyperlink is content-neutral,” a court opinion said. “A search result is fundamentally a reference to something, somewhere else.”
Google and a lawyer for Mr. Defteros didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Several earlier Australian court rulings found social-media and news organizations liable for content on their platforms. In June, a lower-court judge ordered Google to pay about $515,000 over videos posted on its YouTube platform that were found to be defamatory. Last year, the high court ruled that newspapers and television stations are liable for users’ comments on articles the papers and stations post on
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Facebook service—a decision some legal experts said could hinder media companies’ ability to promote important public-interest journalism.
Australian regulation of tech and social-media platforms has gained worldwide attention, particularly when a law passed last year that effectively required tech companies to pay news publishers for content. At one point, Facebook removed news from its platform for Australian users, restoring it a few days later following a public uproar and some changes to the law. Some computer scientists expressed concern the law could end free link sharing, a fundamental principle of the Internet.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the court likened Google’s role in the Defteros case to that of a person who provides directions to a store that sells newspapers. That person could hardly be said to have participated in the communication of any defamatory newspaper content, a court opinion said.
Mr. Defteros at one point asked Google to remove the search result because it contained defamatory material, which he argued was relevant to whether Google should be considered a publisher. But the high court opinion indicated that notifying a party of the existence of defamatory content isn’t enough to make that party a publisher.
The court also rejected Mr. Defteros’s argument that the search result was an enticement to open the webpage, pointing out that the information wouldn’t have been provided had the search-engine user not searched for the term.
“In reality, a hyperlink is merely a tool which enables a person to navigate to another webpage,” it said.
Write to Mike Cherney at [email protected]
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