Blog Details

Author: Advocate Khyati Dhuparr and Associate Debasmita Patra

1. MIAN MIAN LAWSUIT (December 2009)

Chinese writer Mian Mian filed a case against Google accusing the latter of scanning her entire novel without any prior permission or notification or even paying her for copyright permissions.

Google, upon the initiation of the suit, removed Mian’s work from its online library shortly after. In 2013, through a Chinese court, Mian demanded a lump sum of compensation of 5000 Yuan ($800) from Google for scanning her works without permission.

2. PATACSIL vs. GOOGLE INC. (August 2012)

A record amount of $22.5 million was paid by Google Inc. as a civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges regarding the misinterpretation to the users of Apple Inc.’s Safari internet browser. The former had agreed not to place tracking ‘cookies’ but violated the privacy settlement between the FTC and company.

All companies, no matter how big or small, must abide by FTC orders and keep privacy promises to consumers, non-compliance of which may result in Google paying many times of what would have been the cost to comply in the first place.

FTC charged that Google placed a specific advertising tracking cookie on the computers of Safari browser’s users those who visited sites using Google’s DoubleClick advertising network.

3. INNOCENT DISSEMINATION (October 2012)

An Australian native, who had been living there for 42 years, claimed that the results of a Google search of his name brought up stories about an unsolved shooting held in 2004. This resulted in damage to the Australian man’s reputation that led to him being ostracized within his migrant community. A jury labialized Google for defamation in the Victorian Supreme Court in 2012.

In its defense, Google claimed that it was not the publisher and therefore not responsible for the damage. Google argued that its search engines processed on algorithms that crawl the web for content and are automated.

Google’s defense of ‘innocent dissemination’ worked until, in 2009, the man’s solicitors urged Google to remove the images. Finally, Google was held accountable after many how's and not's.

4. VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC. vs. YOUTUBE INC. (2013)

Viacom International sued Google’s video portal, YouTube, in a U.S. District Court. Viacom claimed that YouTube allegedly engaged in ‘brazen’ and ‘massive’ copyright infringement by permitting users to upload and view thousands of videos owned by Viacom without prior permission.

In 2013, the district court ruled finally in favor of YouTube stating that it had no actual knowledge of any infringement issues of Viacom videos and thus could not have “wit fully blinded itself."

5. GARCIA vs. GOOGLE INC. (2015)

Cindy Lee Garcia, an actor, sued Google’s video sharing website YouTube to take down the controversial film, Innocence of Muslims, from the site. Garcia auditioned for a movie with a working title ‘Desert Warrior.' The footage from this movie was used in the controversial movie, ‘Innocence of Muslims.' The movie attracted protests from Muslim majority nations. Garcia herself received death threats due to her involvement in the film.

At first, a California district court denied Garcia’s plea for preliminary injunctions but a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, on appeal reversed the decision of the lower court thereby ordering YouTube to take down all copies of the movie.

6. ORACLE AMERICA INC. vs. GOOGLE INC. (May 2016)

Software firm Oracle claimed infringement on the part of Google of its copyright by making use of 11,500 lines of Java code in its Android operating system.

The strenuous lawsuit ran for a term of 6 years when at last the jury ruled that Google’s use of the 37 Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), was fair use and not infringement. This is great news for developers who depend on free access to APIs for developing third party sources.

7. PAY-GAP COMPLAINT (January 2018)

Just like many other enterprises and organizations, Google was accused of deliberately paying women less than men.

Kelly Ellis submitted the suit, a Google software engineer (2010-2014), Holly Pease, a web giant in miscellaneous leadership roles (2005-2016), Kelli Wisuri (2012-2015) and Heidi Lamar, preschool teacher at the childcare center run by Google (2013-2017) on behalf of other women employees at the company.

The unit was filed in San Fransisco, California and read, “Specifically, Google has paid and continues to pay women less than men in the same job position and level (i.e., salary band), even though Google acknowledges that person in the same job position and level perform substantially equal or substantially similar work.”

8. DATA PROTECTION (May 2016)

Australian privacy campaigner Max Schrems filed multi-billion-Euro complaints against Facebook and Google. Schrems accused Google of ‘coercing’ users into accepting European data collection policies.

The complaint was worth 3.7billion euros that were made with French data protection authority CNIL in lieu of Google’s Android system.

General Data Protection Registration (GDPR), Europe’s new data protection rule book, came into effect in May’18. The aforesaid lawsuit marks a fresh round of legal tug-of-war between Schrems Facebook and Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) that started back in 2011 and are still going.

9. EQUUSTEK SOLUTIONS vs. GOOGLE INC. (June 2017)

Equustek Solutions, a manufacturer of industrial networking gear, sought an injunction forcing Google to stop a rival from misusing his trademarks online by removing search results for that rival not only in Canada also worldwide.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled against Google in this case. This was well spoken against by various civil liberties groups who warned that this would set a precedent to let any judge order a ban on search engine results from anywhere in the world, thereby hampering free speech.

The court emphasized that the order was a temporary injunction and its global implications will be repealed once the intellectual property in question is sorted out.

10. RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN (September 2018)

With the recent consolidation of the European Union privacy laws, Google is bent on convincing the top court of Europe to not push its privacy laws on the rest of the world.

The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) ruled that Google needs to remove several links that have outdated information about a Spanish man, who did not want people to learn about his bankruptcy more than a decade before as it continued to come up every time his name was searched in Google.

This ‘right to be forgotten’ demanded the removal of millions of links from data and information, that is deemed to be inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant and excessive.

To meet its legal obligations in the European Union, Google is being asked to revamp its privacy systems radically, but this could gradually escalate bitter situations as rather than being about the right of privacy, the current situation is a type of censorship that’s being planned to exercise.