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Comment by aardvarkr | Hacker News Reader

That’s my take too. It’s pretty ludicrous

So as is often the case the details are what matter. Google failed to remove defamatory content from their systems after being informed it was defamatory. That’s the case, and they lost because it’s their responsibility to respect such notifications.

It’s like that hot coffee lawsuit. They were held 80% liable because the coffee was served at a seriously unsafe temperature, which isn’t total liability. She got 3rd degree burns on 6 percent of her skin and lesser burns over 16 percent, spent 8 days in the hospital and needed skin grafts. But everyone seems to think coffee = hot and not that dangerous when ignoring the possibility it can be made more dangerous.

I think the thing people are surprised by is that auto-complete searches count as defamation, not that Google didn't take them down.

A distinction is this wasn’t automated once a human looked at the complaint.

>In dismissing the innocent dissemination defense, which required that the publisher be a subordinate distributor who did not know or ought not to have known that the matter was defamatory, the Court stated that the defamatory nature of the content was self-evident from an examination of it.

It's not like the plaintiff went to Google with a prior legal judgment against the RipOff website telling Google to take it down. Apparently the court expects Google to remove (within one month) "self-evident" defamatory content if alerted to it.

That's a pretty interesting precedent to set. What makes defamation"self-evident"?

Primary publishers have to make that judgement all the time. If you get a book published by Harper Collins they're not going to let you put "anything not specifically already ruled defamation by a court" in it.

That's UK/Australian legal/cultural norms for you.

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