[Reasoning of judge who convicted Google...

[Reasoning of judge who convicted Google executives of violating Italy's privacy law:] “There is no such thing as the limitless prairie of Internet where everything is permitted and nothing can be prohibited, on pain of a global excommunication by the people of the Web.

Quite the opposite, there are laws that codify behavior and create obligations which, when they are not respected, lead to a recognition of penal responsibility.

[The executives bore responsibility for the failure of oversight because at least part of the data-handling took place outside of Italy] in particular in the United States, the place where the servers belonging to Google Inc. are undoubtedly located.

Google Italy handled the content that was uploaded to the Google Video platform and therefore bore responsibility for it at least in so far as the [Italian] privacy law is concerned.

[The information made available by Google on its own privacy rules is] “totally inadequate or in any case so buried in the general conditions of the contract as to appear completely ineffective as far as the requirements of the law are concerned.

The guilty verdict was the result not of a failure to conduct a preventive monitoring of the material uploaded to its Google Video platform, but of “insufficient (and culpable) information about the requirements of the law.

The service was deliberately launched without monitoring and only later – given its enormous success – was the possibility introduced for users to report inappropriate content for the purpose of its removal.

The possibility was, in reality, only apparent (given that technical and personnel investments were ridiculously inadequate for the purpose).

In simple words: it’s not the writing on the wall that constitutes a crime for the owner of the wall, but its commercial exploitation, in certain cases and circumstances, can constitute a crime.

In any case, this judge, like everyone else, awaits the arrival of a ‘good law’ on this subject.”

[Judge] Oscar Magi