Australia has decided that search results that Google publishes amount to content that the company “publishes”, and is therefore responsible for.

And Milorad Trkulja has been awarded $200 000 by the Supreme Court of Victoria as a result.

Trkulja, a music promoter, sued Google because Google refused to remove links to sites that falsely claimed, he has connections to organised crime in Melbourne.

Google’s was of the opinion that it’s not a publisher, and this makes some technical sense, and is the general stance amongst other courts around the world. They argued that it was not their responsibility to remove the results because these results were available because “sites in Google’s search results are controlled by those sites’ webmasters, not by Google,” a company spokesperson said.

Google’s search algorithm “points to the most likely links; no human beings were involved in the presentation of your results.”

Google told this to Trkulja in 2009, when he first launched the litigation: contact the sites to have the offensive content removed, Google said. The Supreme Court of Victoria agreed with Google, but only to an extent, and Trkulja had already won a similar case and a similarly-sized libel award from Yahoo, which hosted one of the sites.

However, the court ruled that Google wasn’t responsible for the results until Trkulja had asked it to take them down. (Read the decision in full here.)

This could prove to be a landmark ruling if Google’s appeal is rejected, because it may force Google to comply with every takedown notice it receives from an Australian citizen.

[Source: Mashable]