While Italy’s laws are a lot different than ours and there’s a lot of European bad will toward Google, imagine if this inspires new laws here. Impossible? The music and movie industries are trying hard to get other country’s extreme anti-piracy laws here. Pay the right politicians the right amount of money and…
On Wednesday an Italian judge delivered a stunning verdict in a long standing case against Google. The ruling sentenced three top Google executives — David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer; George Reyes, former chief financial officer; and Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel — to a prison sentence of six months for violating privacy laws. A fourth employee, marketing executive Arvind Desikan, was found not guilty.
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Despite the fact that the verdicts is largely a symbolic gesture, it represents a serious threat to the current way the internet is structured. To understand this, you must explore the case first.Google describes the incident that started the case, writing, “In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate.”
Vivi Down Association, an advocacy group for people with Downs syndrome, complained about the video a couple months later to Italian authorities. Google went out of its way to try to cooperate with them. It took down the video immediately. [...] Despite that cooperation, Italian prosecutors decided to take the bizarre step of next charging a handful of Google executives for “allowing” the video to be uploaded.
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The stunning verdict sets an alarming precedent. The decision, if upheld, threatens the freedom of having blogs, video sharing sites, internet hosting, Wiki pages, news sites with comments sections and virtually any other kind of user generated or user interactive content, for fear of criminal prosecution if users misbehave.
If this was about protecting the rights of the autistic child who suffered from this then the Italian courts and police should have gone after the jerkwad schoolmates and their parents.
Robert Heinlein: “Kill all the lawyers.”
Kissinger and Bush have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Google execs? Not so much.
#22 MikeZ, say what you want about Bush Presidency (either one since you paired him with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Henry Kissinger). A disagreement on politics with the likes of you does not a war criminal make. Come back when you earn your Nobel Peace Prize.
Judges make silly decisions in cases involving technology all the time.
Judges make silly decisions about everything all the time. And they get overruled. That’s what will happen here.
Get used to it. It is going to happen a lot more often.
Some day there will be a “Killing Fields” type movie about the US invasion of Iraq. It won’t be made by Hollywood.
Oh yes, I am so eager to get my Nobel peace prize, so that I can be in the esteemed company of murderers like Kissinger, Arafat, and Obama.
Yes, Obama. Now that he and his attorney general have demonstrated complicity with the war crimes of the past administration, they too are war criminals.
The Nobel committee can take their shiny metal and shove it. It means the opposite of what it says.