An Italian court convicted three Google executives of privacy violations today because they did not act quickly enough to remove an online video that showed sadistic teen bullies pummeling and mocking an autistic boy.
The case was being closely watched around the world due to its implications for Internet freedom.
In the first such criminal trial of its kind, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three in absentia to a six-month suspended sentence and absolved them of defamation charges. A fourth defendant, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.
Google said it would appeal what it called the "astonishing" decision.
"We are deeply troubled by this decision. It attacks the principles of freedom on which the Internet was built," said Google spokesman Bill Echikson.
Those convicted were Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, its senior vice-president and chief legal officer David Drummond and retired chief financial officer George Reyes. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan, based in London, was acquitted. All four had denied wrongdoing.
"The judge has decided I’m primarily responsible for the actions of some teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google video," said Fleischer, who is based in Paris, in a statement.
Drummond said he was "outraged" that he was found criminally responsible for the video, noting that both European Union and Italian law recognized that Internet service providers like Google are not required to monitor content that they host.
In the United States, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally gives Internet service providers immunity in cases like this, but no such protections exist in Europe.
The verdict could help define whether the Internet in Italy–and perhaps beyond–is an open, self-regulating platform or if content must be better monitored for abusive material.
Google had called the trial a threat to freedom on the Internet because it could force providers to attempt an impossible task–pre-screening the thousands of hours of footage uploaded every day onto sites like YouTube.
Prosecutors had insisted the case wasn’t about censorship but about balancing the freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.
The charges were sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome, even though the boy does not have the syndrome. The group alerted prosecutors to the 2006 video showing an autistic student in Turin being pushed, pummeled with items, and insulted by bullies at school.
Google Italy said it took down the video two hours after being notified by police, as is required by law. Prosecutors argued that viewers had flagged it well before police contacted Google, and the fact that it shot to the top of a "most entertaining videos" list on the Italian site, had 5,500 views and 800 comments during the two months it was online meant it should have been noticed sooner.
Thanks to the footage and Google’s co-operation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced by a juvenile court to community service.
