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Dr. Sagües, President of the San Isidro Bar Association, sued Google for damages and sought a preliminary injunction for the removal of two allegedly defamatory blogs. A preliminary injunction was entered by the judge of the lower court compelling Google to remove from its search results the content related to plaintiff. After “Rodríguez”, the Court of Appeals reviewed and modified the terms of the preliminary injunction on the grounds that it was too broad, effectively imposing an obligation to actively monitor content. Thus, it was the plaintiff’s burden to put the search engine on notice of the infringing content by reporting individualized URLs. After the final judgment, on appeal, the majority held that Google was not liable because it had complied with the modified preliminary injunction by blocking specific...

This landmark case addressed the liability of search engines for linking in search results to third-party content that violates fundamental rights or infringes copyright. Because Argentina had no intermediary liability legislation at the time, the Supreme Court reviewed domestic and international law, and reasoned from tort principles and constitutional or human rights law. Its decision was largely favorable to search engines. The Court (1) repudiated a strict liability standard on the basis of the threat it would pose to free expression rights; (2) held that search engines could not be liable for unlawful content upon notification unless a public authority had adjudicated the material as unlawful, with exceptions for cases of "gross and manifest harm"; (3) rejected any filtering obligation to prevent infringing links...

This case is one among numerous civil lawsuits brought against the search engines Google and Yahoo! by different ‘celebrities’ and well‐known public figures for violation of their honor and privacy (see below Rodriguez and Da Cuhna for more background information). In this case, the court found search engines strictly liable under Article 1113 of the Civil Code, which imposes liability, regardless of knowledge or intention, to those performing risky acts (e.g. indexing third party content creating wider audiences for illegitimate content) or serving as the “guardians” of the thing that generates the damage (e.g. the search engine’s software).

This case is one among other civil lawsuits brought against the search engines Google and Yahoo! by different ‘celebrities’ and well‐known public figures for violation of their honor and privacy (see below Da Cuhna for more background information). The plaintiff, a former model, sought an order requiring Google and Yahoo to: (i) permanently block from the search results the links to webpages displaying prostitution ads and pornography whenever they included her name or images, which allegedly violated her constitutional rights; (ii) stop any commercial unauthorized use of her image and name, which allegedly infringed her publicity right and, (iii) pay damages. (1) Specifically, the Court of Appeals first decided that strict liability is not compatible with freedom of expression and rejected the plaintiff’s request to...

In Argentina, controversies against the search engines Google and Yahoo! arose in civil lawsuits brought by different ‘celebrities’ and well‐known public figures for violation of their honor and privacy, or for unauthorized use of their names and images on websites with sexual or pornographic content or with offers of sexual services. Da Cunha is just a sample of over a hundred decisions that all apply very similar arguments to very similar fact patterns: a plaintiff who is famous or well-known had his or her image used without authorization by potentially offensive websites operated by third parties unaffiliated with Google and Yahoo. These operators were not named as parties to the lawsuits. Rather, the plaintiffs brought suits against the search engines for facilitating access to the unauthorized content. The...

In the Bluvol case, the plaintiff came to know of a blog on Blogspot, which he had not created, but was posted under his name. This blog was easily accessible by searching the plainftiff's name on Google. Bluvol argued that the information found on this blog was false and affected his personal and professional life. The court of first instance ruled in Bluvol's favour, requiring the search engines to compensate Bluvol. The judge based his decision on the fact that Google's liability was objective. The Appelate Court sustained that the attributing factor was not objective, since the objective liability of search engines would always lead them to be liable, regardless of their conduct. Moreover, it emphasized that search engines do not create the content. They provide users with tools to access and find it. The Appelate...