Supreme Court of South Australia, Google Inc v Duffy [2017] SASCFC 130 (4 October 2017)

Duffy alleged defamation against Google Inc and Google Australia Pty Ltd for search results that contained links to third-party pages containing defamatory material and extracted snippets that were themselves defamatory. The claim against Google Australia was rejected on the basis that there was no evidence it had the ability to remove the URL links and snippets from the Google Search index.

 

Google Inc. was found liable under defamation law for publishing links to defamatory pages on third party websites, for extracting snippets in its search results, and for defamatory imputations in its autocomplete search function. Liability commenced after Google was put on notice of the defamatory material by the plaintiff in 2009 and did not act to stop publishing the material. Google could not establish that any defences applied. The decision was upheld on appeal by the Supreme Court of South Australia.