Google is responsible for 'autofill' search terms, says Italian court

Google is responsible for the terms thrown up by the 'autocomplete' function of its search engine, and was responsible for the defamatory meaning of words that appeared when an Italian man's name was searched for, the Court of Milan has ruled (10-page / 2.79MB PDF).

Autocomplete suggests words or characters for completing a partial search on Google and the words 'con man' and 'fraud' appeared when a man's name was entered into Google.

Google claimed that it was protected by the E-Commerce Directive, which exempts online service providers from liability for content they give access to but which was not created by them.

The man argued that Google could control the content that its autocomplete function produces and the Court agreed. "Google argued that it could not be held liable because it is a hosting provider, but we showed that this is content produced by them (and by the way, they do filter out certain content, including terms that are know to be used to distribute copyright infringing material), although through automated means," said the lawyer who acted for the man, Carlo Piana in a blog post. The autocomplete search was not wholly automatic and Google did have control over the defamatory suggestions its algorithms gave for the man's name search, the court said.

Piana said that the defamatory search suggestions had 'caused a lot of trouble' for his client who he said is 'an entrepreneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance.'

Earlier this year, Google censored some words in its autocomplete keyword search after relating them to illegal piracy, according to a report in technology news service All Technology News. Users are not prompted with suggested entries for partially entered characters for illegal download platforms, for example.

Google's search engine is governed by mathematical algorithms that prioritise results according to their popularity by prior users. Google had argued that it had no control over the defamatory words being associated with the man via autocomplete.

"We believe that Google should not be held liable for terms that appear in autocomplete as these are predicted by computer algorithms based on searches from previous users, not by Google itself. We are currently reviewing our options," Google said.

The court has ordered Google to pay the man's legal fees and expenses.

Last year three Google executives were handed suspended prison sentences by an Italian court for not adhering to defamation and privacy laws.

Google failed to remove a video from YouTube, the video-sharing website it owns, of Turin school pupils bullying an autistic schoolmate, following user complaints.

The court found the video had been on YouTube for two months before it was eventually removed 'within hours' of a request by the Italian police.

However the delay in responding to user comments asking for the video to be removed meant Google was outside of the protection given to it under the E-Commerce Directive which states that an internet provider must remove illegal content once it has been notified of its existence, the court ruled.