Google Loses Italian Autocomplete Defamation Case

“On Tuesday, lead counsel Carlo Piana wrote on his blog that the Court of Milan has upheld its earlier decision to order Google to filter out libellous search suggestions. These are the suggestions that pop up in Google’s search input bar, proposing what the user might be wanting to search for. People searching via Google for Piana’s client, who remains publicly unnamed, were apparently presented with autocomplete suggestions including truffatore (“con man”) and truffa (“fraud”).Google lost its bid to claim the protection of the E-Commerce Directive’s safe harbour provisions, which partly shields hosting and ISPs from liability for content held on or transmitted over their systems. However, the court viewed the autocomplete suggestions as being produced by Google itself.”