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The intellectual property court of Florence has issued an interesting decision on the liability of search engines and the circumstances when they are obliged to remove infringing material.
The dispute refers to a case concerning an entrepreneur that had identified on the Internet some non-authorized pictures reproducing him and some defamatory comments about his company. Since the webmaster of the website where such information was published could not be identified, the entrepreneur requested Google to remove such website from its search results and – following Google’s denial of such removal – decided to bring a claim against the company.
The court held that the illegal conduct had not been performed as the pictures had been taken in public and there was no economic exploitation of the information. However, the most interesting part of the decision concerns the qualification of Google as a caching provider obliged to remove infringing material only following a court order and therefore for instance a mere notice from a party alleging that its rights have been infringed would not be sufficient.
The decision is interesting for the qualification given to Google as caching provider that with a different outcome had been reached also in the recent Yahoo! case and the limited scope given to the circumstances when a search engine is obliged to remove infringing material which follows an approach completely different from the one of the recent YouTube cases.
We shall carefully watch the view followed by Italian courts in the future to see which position will prevail, but in the meantime if you want to discuss about the above feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio.
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