Court: Google will not be required to delete defamatory results

Four months after the European High Court ruled that Google had to remove sensitive or embarrassing search results if asked to do so, an Israeli court has ruled the opposite, saying that even in serious cases of proven defamation, Google is not required to remove relevant results.

The ruling, which is expected to have a significant effect on the rights of Israelis to privacy and to "be forgotten" by wiping their past from the Internet, was handed down last week by judge Hannah Yinon in the Tel Aviv Magistrates' Court in the case of attorney Ami Savir.

According to the ruling, in 2005 Savir represented the Israel Bar Association in disciplinary measures it took against attorney Yoram Arbib Leonalo, who was convicted in court in five separate cases. Following his conviction, Shaul Bar-Noi, who owns the Israeli court website court.org.il, published the verdicts against Arbib and set the page code to feature the headline: "Lawyer convicted in five different cases."

As a result, when an Internet user fed the name "Ami Savir" into Google's search engine, the result that popped up was "Lawyer convicted in five different cases." Savir sued Bar-Noi and Google, claiming that the headline gave the impression it referred to him, and was defamatory. The court ruled that Bar-Noi had to pay Savir 80,000 shekels ($22,000) in compensation.

However, when it came to changing the search results on Google, which was represented by attorneys Barak Tal, Ruth Loven, and Yonat Afriat from the firm Yigal Arnon and Co., the court ruled against Savir, determining that the defamatory headline had been copied from the website's code automatically and not by any person. Therefore, the court ruled, Google, as a search engine, could not be forced to assume responsibility for showing content published by a third party -- Bar-Noi's site -- which could have easily changed the headline at any time.

The court accepted Google's argument that "making Google responsible for deciding in such circumstances whether [the content] is defamatory to a degree that would demand that it be removed from the search results makes Google into a 'super-censor' with the power to prevent access to harmless information."

While the European Court ruled that Google must allow Internet users to be forgotten "unless specific circumstances justify public interest in the information," the Israeli court decided that "Google cannot be unconditionally directed to remove search results any time a person asks them to take down something they don't like."