A Canadian court has awarded a businessman $500,000 for Google’s failure to remove a link to a defamatory blog post from its search results. Google has to pay the sum because the company refused to consistently remove the link from web search results.
The Quebec Supreme Court made its decision on March 28, and now it has US-Technikmagazin Ars Technica reported on the case. The Canadian businessman from Montreal came across a defamatory blog entry on the RipOffReport website in 2007 after several business partners had ended contact with him for no reason. In the post, the person treated anonymously by the court was falsely accused of pedophilia, among other things.
Under Canadian law, the businessman could no longer have the actual post removed because it had been over a year since it was published. Instead, he attempted to reduce his visibility by contacting Google and requesting that the post be removed from search results.
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However, Google had not consistently complied with this request: the link had disappeared from the search results in the meantime, but then reappeared. The businessman eventually decided to sue, seeking C$6 million in damages.
The defamatory content of the post caused the businessman great damage: it not only damaged the Canadian’s business, but also strained his family relationship. The Canadian court reconstructed the case in the Judgment reasoning. The judge in charge compared the attempt to persuade Google to delete the content with a “nightmare”.
“Dark Odyssey”
The businessman was “helpless” and went through a “dark odyssey”. Google, which did not want to comment on the case to Ars Technica, took the view that it was not legally obliged to block the links in question. The company must remove links to the defamatory post from Quebec search results following the ruling (file number 2023 QCCS 1167).
In the European Union, the GDPR allows search engines to delete links under various circumstances. This “right to be forgotten”, which actually means “right to erasure”, is enshrined in Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation. Accordingly, search engines must remove (“list out”) links to information if the applicant can prove that the information contained in the contribution is incorrect. Google offers a formwhich allows EU residents to request content delisting.
(dahe)
