Regular readers may remember when Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, was convicted by an Italian court for supposedly violating Italian privacy law. Peter had done nothing, but he was convicted because Google supposedly violated Italian privacy law by hosting a video uploaded by a Google Video user that showed a disabled youth being bullied. Peter and other Google executives were acquitted on other charges of criminal defamation and sentenced to six-month suspended sentences. Google appealed the conviction, and the appeal is now being heard in court. Previous coverage on this blog can be found here.
Over on his personal blog, Peter describes what’s going on there and why the conviction sets a particularly dangerous precedent.
I wish Peter and his colleagues the best of luck with this appeal as I agree with them that holding platforms responsible for the content users upload can have a crippling impact on the future of the internet.