Scary

Thanks to my friend Dan Lally for giving me a heads up on this blog post. It describes how three Google employees were convicted as a result of a video that some Italian students posted on Google showing them bullying an autistic student. Google took down the video as soon as it was notified, and assisted authorities in identifying the poster. But that didn’t stop the Google employees from getting caught in a criminal justice system. The charges were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. The important thing is THE GOOGLE EMPLOYEES HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE VIDEO. Apparently their crime was being employed by the service that allowed the video to be posted. In the United States we have come to understand that in the online world, liability generally rests with the person who creates and uploads the content. The site is not typically responsible, especially when the site quickly removes the offending content. But that is a cultural matter, and it’s not universal. It is a problem, and will continue to be a problem for popular Internet sites that operate worldwide. Which is basically every one of them. Remember that the first two “w’s” in “www” stand for “world wide.”