Google has been ordered by a Quebec court to pay $500,000 to a man who saw a site that accused him of being a fraudster and a pedophile appear in the search engine results. After trying for 10 years to have this site removed from Google, he filed a complaint and won his lawsuit.
This is the story of a Canadian businessman, prominent in the real estate brokerage sector. After seeing that several customers refuse to do business with him, he decides to Google his name to find out if anything there had deterred them from doing business with him. In April 2007, he discovered that the “RipoffReport” website had written an article in April 2006 which falsely called him a scammer and claimed he had been “convicted of molesting minors in 1984“.
Google refuses to remove slanderous article
The Canadian then asks the founder of the site to withdraw this article, but the latter refuses and demands that the businessman prove that he has never been accused of this crime, in an absurd reversal of the burden of proof. . The man then learned that it was too late to take legal action to have the RipOffReport article removed. In Canada, “the legal action must be brought within one year of its publication, regardless of when the defamation victim becomes aware of the publication“.
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Faced with the impossibility of having the article removed online, the latter then turned to Google to ask the search engine to hide the slanderous site from its results. For years, Google moved back and forth inconsistently, sometimes accepting removal requests only to then deny them as links kept resurfacing.
A legal battle with Google
In 2022, the man finally decides to file a complaint against Google. The search engine first argued that under Section 230 of the United States Communications Act (the Communications Decency Act), the company was not responsible for third-party content and had no obligation to remove links. Citing NAFTA, the free trade agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico, Google suggested that the Quebec law requiring companies to remove illegal content as soon as they become aware of it could not apply, as it contradicts Article 230.
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The judge handling the case did not buy into Google’s logic, but also did not award punitive damages. Indeed, Google had refused to remove the links believing in good faith to be authorized to ignore the man’s requests. In his decision, made public on March 28, the judge wrote: “Google repeatedly ignored the complainant, told him there was nothing he could do, told him he could remove the hyperlink on the Canadian version of his search engine but not on the American version, then ‘let reappear on the Canadian version after a 2011 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada in a case unrelated to the publication of hyperlinks“. The judge thus condemned the search engine to pay him 500,000 dollars and to remove the article from its results.
A very important question of law relating to Google
Although he found in favor of the plaintiff, the judge also said it was unlikely to trigger a series of similar cases forcing Google to remove links, as he wrote in his ruling:
“This case raises questions without precedent in Quebec law on the responsibility of a company like Google, which provides search engine services on the Internet, for having disseminated to users of its search engine a defamatory Internet message, written by a third party and appearing on the site of another third party, despite being informed that it facilitates access to illegal activity, namely defamatory content. However, the Court’s finding in this judgment that Google is liable does not open the door to defamation claims against Google or other Internet intermediaries.”
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The judge does not want to create a legal precedent that would open Pandora’s box, allowing people to file a complaint against Google when information is false about them on the Internet.
The businessman cleared by justice against Google
At least, this affair will have allowed this man to whitewash his name from the pages of the search engine. Unfortunately, he will have lived through a terrible psychological ordeal for 15 years. Not only did the businessman lose potential clients and contracts, but his personal relationships suffered from false claims online that he was a paedophile: one of his sons had to distance himself from his father because he also worked in real estate.
