Since 2009, Google has been condemned
several times by the French Courts in defamation and insult cases relating to
its “Google Suggest" system. For instance, in a decision of 14 December
2011, the Court of Appeal of Paris condemned Google Inc and its director of
publication for an insult that was generated by Google’s keyword suggestion
system. The court considered that associating the term “crook" and the
corporate name of a company is public abuse on the part of Google.
In the present case, the High Court of
First Instance of Paris ("Tribunal de grande instance de Paris"), in
a judgment dated 15 February 2012, decided that Google’s keyword suggestion
system caused public abuse by associating the term “sect" with the name of
an association.
If
associating the term “sect" with the name of an organisation or a person
incontrovertibly constitutes public abuse, it is questionable whether Google has
actually committed a criminal act in this case, since its keyword suggestion
system simply reflects what the users enter into the search engine, i.e. the
name of the organisation with the term “sect".
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