The recent decision by the Paris Court convicting Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his for defamation Following the search keywords associated with the unpleasant name of the complainant will undoubtedly be a landmark in French jurisprudence and even international!
It is extensively detailed on the merits by William.
Anti-Americanism will s' to rejoice ("Google sentenced, cool!") but I think they have a great mistake: this decision could in fact destroy rather the innovative efforts of many technology startups, much less well equipped than Google in terms of legal defense and with very deep pockets that the Mountain View giant to pay the bills of lawyers. And if the situation of digital innovation freezes or slows dramatically in the current situation, Europe will only lost many battles but the war ...
Indeed, the key sentence of this decision is in my opinion. "algorithms or software solutions proceed from the human mind before being implemented" and it TGI deduced that these algorithms to the responsibility of those who produce / use so that Google in this case.
Even if taken literally, this assertion is obviously correct. It poses a real problem because, by analogy, it can potentially endanger all sites that publish content items from the application of algorithms on their raw material: the digital information generated by their users or direct collected on other sites.
The court here applied this assertion keywords defamatory connotation coupled by the searches of other users but the way is open for other trials:
all content aggregators (Wikio, Digg, etc ...) whose algorithms put the first page of information at times "contentious" are now risking such trials in their turn. Ditto for social networks (Facebook in mind!) Who republish information at the request of their members. In general, these are the most salacious which travel faster through these algorithms for any "emotion"-they generate.
These sites must therefore obtain, if not already done so, a team of editors willing to eradicate any content soon it is contested by the players he puts into question their claim. This will at least ensure their compliance with the law LCEN .
doing so, these sites will acquire an editorial side more and more marked (when they want to escape to continue to operate at large scale without enormous human cost ...) and thus expose themselves more to legal attacks from the manual selection ever more intense they will have to make to "fix" the flawed results of their algorithms. The trap of the vicious circle!
Trials similar to those of Wikio or Fuzz (Earned by these startups in the first round) or other instances when Google might re-emerge in the short term for a second test against this new law! For example, the famous "hole in the c. .." The recent presidential next to which you could not pass in recent weeks: again, these are the algorithms that Google brought up this page of results for these keywords. The argument so often used by Google "is not us, our algorithm is" no longer holds ....
This decision does not she just open the Pandora's box ? Wrongly or reason: to me it is not clear right now .... é
PS: Loved the court balances on one side then the other are normal. It is not easy to deal with these situations all very similar when it comes to judging the indirect result of the work (algorithm) of a person / team for its realization (the results of the moment) that can come from months or years after writing that algorithm, ie in a new and different.
Source: Media and Tech Blog (by Didier Durand)
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