Legal News

A Post About Google; All About Google

By Ashby Jones

Wow. Dawn is just cresting over the Golden State. Yet already Google is making news on the legal front. Lots and lots of news.

Guilty in Italy . . . Let’s kick off the Google roundup over in Milan, where an Italian judge Wednesday found three Google executives guilty of violating the privacy of a disabled student after a video of him being bullied was posted on a platform managed by the Web giant.

That’s right. Guilty. This was a criminal case. And Italian Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three Google executives to a six-month prison sentence for privacy violation (though he did clear the trio of defamation charges.) The Google executives convicted aren’t expected to go to jail because a sentence under three years is commuted in Italy for people without a criminal record.

The three international executives convicted are David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer; George Reyes, former chief financial officer and Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel. Click here for the early WSJ story.

Probed in Brussels . . . The Italian ruling isn’t Google’s only potential European problem. Google revealed on Tuesday that European antitrust authorities have opened a preliminary inquiry into complaints about its tactics made by three European Internet companies.

The inquiry appears to focus largely on complaints that Google unfairly ranks the sites of Internet competitors, in effect lowering their rank in search listings on Google sites.

Google denied violating European law or taking any action to stifle competition. Click here for the WSJ story.

And Sued in Delaware . . . Xerox has sued Yahoo and Google, alleging that the companies have infringed on Xerox’s patents on Internet search and e-commerce technology.

The suit, filed in federal court in Wilmington, alleges that Google’s AdSense and AdWords software-programs that serve up ads based on Web-site content and users’ search requests-violate a Xerox patent on automatically generating queries. Click here for the complaint; here for the WSJ story. Repping Xerox: John Day and Lawrence “No Relation to the Law Blog” Ashby of Wilmington’s Ashby & Geddes, and Cravath’s Richard Stark.

“These claims are entirely without merit, and we’ll defend against them vigorously,” said Catherine Lacavera, senior litigation counsel at Google.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 24, 2010 (boomark / email).