Rana claimed damages from Google Australia and Google Inc. in defamation for publishing links to defamatory websites in its search results. The Federal Court granted summary judgment to Google Australia, holding that it had no control over the search results. Leave was granted to serve Google Inc. extraterritorially, although the court expressed doubt as to whether Google could be described as a “publisher” of the defamatory imputations.
Plaintiff’s personal information and photos in Google’s search engine were displayed together with pictures of major known criminals in Melburne, Australia. Plaintiff sued Google for defamation and required the content to be taken down. Plaintiff claimed that the search results were defamatory because created the false innuendo that he was involved with crime in Melburne. The jury in this case was asked to answer the question whether search engines are liable for publishing defamatory materials that are assembled for the first time in an automated manner by their software. Jury found that search engines, such as Google, are publisher of the defamatory material when their software produce and put together search results in accordance with its intended operation. The judge in this case instructed the jury that it was...
A news website publisher was found liable for publishing vilifying comments posted by a reader. A claim was brought under s 18C the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), which prohibits doing or saying anything unlawful on the basis of race. The court held that the news website was responsible for reader comments because it actively sought comments from readers, and reserved the right to not publish or to modify the comments. This level of control, combined with actual knowledge, was sufficient to find the newspaper responsible. Damages of $12,000 were awarded against Nationwide News.
Cooper and his hosting provider, Comcen, were liable for authorising infringements by users of his website, mp3s4free.net, which linked to infringing MP3 files on third-party websites. The index was populated by links submitted by users, but no infringing material was stored or communicated by Cooper or ComCen. The court found that Cooper had the power to prevent infringement because he could have not provided his website in the first place (Branson J) or could have not accepted or subsequently disabled and removed links to infringing content (Kenny J). Second, the relationship between Cooper and users was commercial, because Cooper benefitted financially from sponsorship and advertisements on the website which directly increased with the volume of infringing content. Finally, the court held that Cooper did not take...
Sharman, who operated the Kazaa filesharing platform, were found liable for authorising the infringements of its users. The court held that Sharman knew that the Kazaa system was primarily used to share copyright material. Infringing activity attracted more visitors to the Kazaa site, which benefitted Sharman through advertising revenue. Although there was no Kazaa central server through which Sharman could control users’ activities, the court held that Sharman had the power to prevent infringements because it could have forced an upgrade of the software to inhibit infringement. The court considered, for example, that a keyword filter could have been implemented, or Sharman could have flooded users’ search results with files containing only copyright infringement warnings. Since Sharman had the power to take these...
The Wall Street Journal / Barron’s online published allegations of criminal activity by Gutnick, and Australian citizen and resident. The article was accessible to paying online subscribers, some of whom (.3%) paid with credit cards linked to Australian addresses. Defendant publisher’s editors and their web servers were all in the United States. Gutnick sued for defamation. Defendant argued that Australian courts lacked jurisdiction. It said that jurisdiction should be determined by the location of servers, unless that location was “adventitious or opportunistic,” that is, intended to avoid legitimate assertions of jurisdiction. Plaintiff countered that jurisdiction existed in any place where content could be downloaded by authorized subscribers. The court considered at length defamation-specific doctrines such as the...