By Eric J Lyman in Milan, Italy, for ISN Security Watch:As unlikely as it seems, a worn out Fascist-era courtroom in the historical center of Milan may have a lot to say about the way business on the Internet may evolve over the coming years. It's there that five officials from the video unit of Internet giant Google are on trial for privacy and defamation in a case that could set a precedent for how the law will look at companies like Google in the future.
The case is based on an appalling 191-second film uploaded to the Google Video site showing four Turin youths physically and verbally abusing a frightened classmate with Down syndrome. In the video, one of the youths falsely identified himself as a member of a Down syndrome advocacy group called "Vivi Down."
The youths were tracked down - with the help of Google - and made to serve one year of community service in a center for children with Down syndrome. But now Google officials are in the spotlight for allegedly contributing to the defamation of Vivi Down.
In an 18 February hearing, judge Oscar Magi - a veteran of many high-profile cases in Milan, including some of the city's "clean hands" trials in the 1990s, some corruption trials against controversial Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and hearings on the 2003 CIA abduction of the Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr - simply allowed the case to move forward with three secondary plaintiffs against Google tacked onto it. Unless it's thrown out in March on jurisdictional grounds, it's likely to drag on for months or even years.At the heart of it are two main questions:
• Should companies like Google Video - and, by extension, other companies that host content they do not actually produce, such as Facebook, eBay, or Craigslist - be governed by the same rules that apply for pure content sites like those operated by the New York Times or The Economist?
• In an age of new economy countries that can reach across the globe from distant headquarters, should they be subject to the laws in each country where they have a presence?
Prosecutors in the case charge that Google Video was too slow in removing the offending film, which remained online for two months in 2006, rising as high as No. 29 on the site's ranking of "most amusing" videos. They say Google received multiple complaints and refused to act.
But Guglielmo Pisapia, the lead attorney for the Google officials in the case, argues that it was taken down within about five hours of being officially notified of the offending video by Italian law enforcement.
"If the argument is that they should have evaluated the video before it was posted, then that is a dangerous precedent. Preventive monitoring is the kind of censorship that could kill the internet," Pisapia told ISN Security Watch.
Raffaele Zallone, the attorney in one of the three secondary cases against Google, said that Google Video should have better control mechanisms in place.
"If someone puts an inappropriate photo up on MySpace or Facebook, it will be removed within half a day," Zallone said. "Why was that video still on the Google Video site nearly two months after it was uploaded?"
Magi's decision on the matter will set a precedent that could be interpreted not only in Italy, but also across Europe, where privacy and defamation laws are substantially similar.
The question about whether or not a company like Google can be tried in a distant jurisdiction where it has limited operations - just 18 of Google's 20,000 worldwide employees work on Italian soil - will be answered much sooner. Magi scheduled the next hearing for 17 March.He could rule then that the Milan court is not the correct venue for the trial, which would then likely be moved to Turin, where the offensive events actually took place. Or he could rule that Italy does not have jurisdiction in the case, since Google's
servers where the video was stored are all located at the company's California headquarters. If that happens, the case will be thrown out.
One 19 February, the family of the Down syndrome boy dropped their case against Google Video, citing the company's "solidarity" over their plight. And while two of the three secondary cases - called parte civile in Italian legalesque - filed their cases at least in part to increase awareness about Down syndrome, it's already clear that the case has moved beyond the deplorable abuse of a boy with Down syndrome to one about how the Internet should be run.