Free for a Fee

As Google grows, so too does the list of legal scrapes it’s gotten itself into — with antitrust and copyright issues rising to the top of the docket in recent days. But the company can breathe a little easier in one area — U.K.-centered libel issues — after the British High Court ruled last Friday that that Google isn’t responsible for defamatory material trawled by its search engine. Click here and here for the WSJ and NYT stories, respectively.

Justice David Eady ruled that Google’s Internet search engine isn’t considered a publisher under defamation law, and therefore isn’t responsible for the content of the short descriptions of Web sites that appear in Google searches.

The case was initiated by Metropolitan International Schools Ltd., an online training company based in the U.K. The company had sued Google over comments posted on Web forums accusing the training company of running a scam, an allegation Metropolitan International Schools denied, according to the judgment.

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The content in this post was found at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/07/21/a-defamation-declaration-google-wins-uk-libel-suit/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.