Yesterday Google was in the UK High Court. The ruling was in favour of Google, and was that Google is not liable for any defamatory comments that appear in its SERPs (search engine results pages). Mr. Justice Eady ruled that Google’s search engine was not responsible for comments relating to Metropolitan International Business Schools, who specialise in distance learning courses. The court declared that Google is merely a facilitator of content on the internet, and not a publisher.
This leads to an interesting question for all webmasters. What is the meaning of published content now? If you display RSS feeds from other websites, are you responsible for the content that appears or not? To what point, if at all, will you be responsible?
