Dan's New Blog

Or maybe not. Italian judge Oscar Magi yesterday convicted 3 Google executives — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — of violating Italian privacy laws in the case of a YouTube video uploaded by students tormenting a handicapped classmate. Google removed the offending video immediately once it was notified about it, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the Italian court.

When I blogged about this previously, I asked, “Does this make sense to you?” I’m still asking this question. Why doesn’t Google have a safe harbor in this case? Google wants to know, too:

“But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”