An Argentine civil judge held Google and Yahoo liable for content posted by third parties to a Web site, rejecting the companies’ defenses that they were mere intermediaries, therefore not responsible for the actions of the Web site linking the name of the plaintiff to pornographic and female-escort Web sites without her consent (
Rodriguez Maria Belen v. Google Inc, Juzg. N. 95, No. 99613/2006, March 4 2010
). The court awarded USD $100,000 in damages.
This new case sets a different standard from one decided last year (
Da Cunha v. Google
) where a strict liability rule was applied to hold Yahoo and Google liable under a similar fact scenario. This case was appealed to the Civil Court of Appeals and there is no decision yet.
The judge held that the search engines are liable since they had knowledge of the illegality of the content and did not act to remove it expeditiously. The content in question was the picture and name of the plaintiff included in certain adult Web sites without her consent. The lawsuit is based on the right of image protected by a specific statute in Argentina. The judge also ordered the companies to remove the plaintiff’s name, image, likeness, and photos in the search engines’ indexes.
