Australia's High Court has overturned the 2020
decision that search results pointing to news stories make Google a publisher.
That case concerned a lawyer named George Defteros, who was charged with conspiracy alongside one of his prominent criminal clients.
The charges against Defteros were dropped, but for years afterwards Google search results produced a link to a story in local broadsheet
The Age – known as "the Underworld article" – reporting he had been charged.
Defteros was miffed that the allegation remained on the record, and that Google helped people find it. So he sued – and won.
Google appealed to the High Court, Australia's ultimate jurisdiction. It won, and has had orders made against it in the lower court set aside
A
statement [PDF] from the High Court explains that the article about Defteros was defamatory, but that a majority of justices felt Google "did not lend assistance to
The Age in communicating the defamatory matter contained in the Underworld article to the third-party user."
"The provision of a hyperlink in the Search Result merely facilitated access to the Underworld article and was not an act of participation in the bilateral process of communicating the contents of that article to a third party," the statement adds.
Google is therefore not a publisher and can't defame people with search results under Australian common law.
www.theregister.com
