Italian Court Finds Google Violated Privacy: Via NYT > Privacy.

Google said the case, involving a video of bullying, could undermine freedom of expression on the Internet.

MILAN — Three Google executives were convicted Wednesday of violating Italian privacy laws in a ruling that the company denounced as an “astonishing” attack on freedom of expression on the Internet.

The case involves online videos showing an autistic boy being bullied by classmates in Turin, which were posted in 2006 on Google Video, an online video-sharing service that Google ran before its acquisition of YouTube.

Prosecutors charged that the videos violated Italian personal privacy protections. They said the clips were removed only after complaints from Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing people with Down syndrome, whose name was mentioned in the videos.

“We are definitely satisfied that someone has to take responsibility for this violation of privacy,” said Guido Camera, a lawyer for Vivi Down.

Google said it planned to appeal, warning that the verdicts raised serious questions about the viability of user-generated content platforms like YouTube in Italy and potentially elsewhere in Europe.

“If company employees like me can be held criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the video in question, then our liability is unlimited,” said one of the three executives, Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy counsel.

“The decision today therefore raises broader questions like the continued operation of many Internet platforms that are the essential foundations of freedom of expression in the digital age,” he said in a statement.

Video-sharing services like Google Video and YouTube generally rely on users to notify them of potentially problematic content, which is then taken down if it violates the terms of service. Screening or editing the contents of user-generated video sites in advance, they say, is impossible because of the volume of material that is posted.

Google insists that under European Union law, video-sharing sites and other Internet companies are protected from liability for the content of material posted. But it is a gray area, according to legal experts.

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The executives, who were named because Italian law holds corporate executives responsible for a company’s actions, received six-month suspended sentences. They had faced sentences of up to one year.

While the executives were found guilty of privacy violations, they were cleared of charges of defamation. A fourth Google executive, Arvind Desikan, faced only the defamation charge and was also cleared.

Giuseppe Bana, the lawyer for Mr. Drummond, called the verdicts “contradictory.”

“The fact that the accusation of defamation did not pass is significant,” he said.

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