Netherlands:
Webmaster can be held liable for Google snippet
On his web site,
Joris van Hoboken mentiones an interesting preliminary judgement of the
court in Amsterdam. A snippet in the Google result list suggested that the
plaintiff was bankrupt, resulting in telephone calls from several users and a
regional newspaper. Usually one would expect a lawsuit against Google, but in
this case, the plaintiff went after the web master, who had written a text that
was completly legal and tried to hold him responsible for the misleading
combination of the sentences by Google. The court agreed, because:
- plaintiff had suffered damages by the snippet
- plaintiff had informed the defendant about the problem
and asked him to fix it
- defendant had optimized his web site for search engines
- defendant could easily have changed his web site so that
the snippet would also have changed.
What about freedom of expession? If, at all, one can be
held resonsible for the snippet, it is Google. The court can't punish a web
master, only because he optimizes his web site and has some knowledge about the
functioning of search engines. He has no direct influence on the wording of the
snippet. Even if he had changed his web site, there is no guarantee that the
snippet would have changed too. If he had written "unable to pay his bills"
instead of "bankrupt", where would be the advantage in a snippet suggesting the
plaintiff was unable to pay his bills. If the defendat had to name the plaintiff
in his text (for what reason whatsoether), how can a judge say that this has to
be changed because of the conduct of an unrelated company (Google)? The
defendant has appealed the decision.