Four months after the European Union's High Court of Justice ruled that the right to privacy outweighs the public's right to know, and therefore Google must remove sensitive or embarrassing search results, an Israeli court dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed against Google.
The ruling was issued last week by Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court Judge Hanna Yinon, in the case of Attorney Ami Savir.
In 2005, Attorney Savir represented the Bar Association in disciplinary proceedings conducted against another lawyer who was convicted in 5 different cases in the Disciplinary Court. Following the conviction, Shaul Bar-Noy, the owner of the website Court.gov.il, who was also sued in the proceedings, published the verdict against the convicted lawyer, and defined in the technical code of the website the title: "This is a lawyer who was convicted in 5 different cases.".
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As a result, when a surfer entered the search query "Ami Savir" into the Google search engine, a result appeared on the search page linking to a site titled "He is a lawyer who was convicted in 5 different cases.".
Savir filed a defamation lawsuit against Bar-Noy and Google, in which he claimed that the title appearing on Google constitutes defamation, as it indicates that he is the lawyer who was convicted in 5 different cases. This, while in fact he only represented the Bar Association in the disciplinary proceedings, while the convicted person was another lawyer. In the lawsuit, Attorney Savir claimed that both the website owner and Google are liable to him.
As for the advertising website and its owner, Bar-Noy, Judge Yinon partially accepted the claim, ruling that the defamatory headline constituted defamation. The judge ruled that Bar-Noy must pay the advertiser compensation of 80,000 shekels.
The judge, as stated, dismissed the lawsuit against Google, which was presented by attorneys Barak Tal, Ruth Loban, and Yonath Afriat-Mena of the Yigal Arnon & Co. law firm. According to her, the defamatory title was copied from the site's technical code in an automatic process and without human intervention, and therefore there is no reason to hold Google, as a search engine, responsible for displaying content published by a third party, the advertising site, which could have easily changed the title at any time.
The court's decision was based, in part, on the testimony of an engineering manager on Google's search team, who testified and said that the search engine is based on a "crawler" that moves between the various web pages and completely automatically creates an index that allows any word or phrase to quickly reach specific web pages.
""The search engine does not create content itself," the judge ruled, adding that "the information is automatically entered into the Google search engine and cannot, from a practical perspective, undergo a preliminary review by a human agent who would review that information.".
The court also accepted Google's claim that "imposing responsibility on Google to decide on its own in these circumstances whether it is defamation, in such a way that the search result should be removed, turns Google into a 'super-censor', with the power to prevent access to information that is not offensive.".
In its decision, the court also referred to the European Court of Justice's ruling from May 2014, which ruled that Google is obligated to remove search results based on the "right to be forgotten.".
""After reviewing the parties' arguments in this matter, it seems that it is not appropriate to set firm limits on the matter and to firmly determine that whenever a person asks Google to remove any search result that is not to their liking, it must remove it without any conditions, even if that expression was created and published by a third party and not by them, or whether it is a violation of the third party's freedom of expression," the ruling states.
