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Australian Court Finds Google Guilty Of Defamation

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Google is having a bad week.

Rumours are flying around at the moment that the search giant might fall foul of an FTC ruling stateside.

Meanwhile down under an Australian court has found the search giant guilty of defamation. In what has been described as a “landmark ruling” the Victoria Supreme Court found that the search engine had defamed a man via its search results.

The court awarded the man AUD $200,000 damages. The same gentleman had already successfully sued Yahoo! and got an award of $225,000.

How did this happen?

Seemingly the man’s name appeared in search results beside the photo of an infamous criminal…

While the sum of the award isn’t significant for a company of Google’s size the bigger issue is that this could leave the door open for a very large number of court cases. The sum of money grows very quickly if you’re looking at hundreds of these cases..

You can read the full story here.

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