Google, on Wednesday won a High Court case in a protracted legal battle with Melbourne lawyer George Defteros that began in 2016. At the heart of the dispute was the issue of whether Google is a publisher or merely a third-party platform.
In 2020, Mr Defteros successfully sued Google for $40,000 after the search engine giant refused to take down a hyperlink to a newspaper article that Mr Defteros said was defamatory.
Google took the case to the High Court arguing that it was not the publisher of the content in question, but a navigator.
The article recounted how Mr Defteros had been charged in 2004 with conspiracy and incitement in the murder of Victorian underworld crime figures, including Carl Williams. The charges against the lawyer were dropped the following year.
In 2020, the Supreme Court of Victoria found that Google was a publisher and that it had defamed Mr Defteros.
Google went to the High Court with the argument that it was only a navigator, not a publisher of content, not unlike how telephony company facilitates telephone calls.
In its submissions to the High Court, Google stated: “A hyperlink only communicates that something exists or where it exists. …It is the operator of the webpage who communicates the content to the user.”
Mr Defteros in his submissions to the High Court argued that Google was an active participant and “… not a passive tool, such as the facility provided by a telephone company.”
The High Court ruled by a majority in support of Google. It found that the digital giant was not a publisher of the material in dispute.
“A majority of the court held that the appellant did not lend assistance … in communicating the defamatory matter contained in the article … to the third-party users,” the ruling read.
“The provision of a hyperlink in the Search Result merely facilitated access to the … article and was not an act of participation in the bilateral process of communicating the contents of that article to a third party.”
The court added that there was no basis for finding it acted as a publication because Google had no part in writing or disseminating the defamatory material.
“There being no publication, the majority found it unnecessary to consider the defences raised by the appellant.”
Neos Kosmos contacted Mr Defteros for a response.
“This has been a very long, drawn out, expensive and extremely stressful process,” Mr Defteros said in a written statement.
“The decision of the High Court today is not that the article that I had complained of, and successfully sued John Sylvester over, was not defamatory of me.
“The High Court decided, by a majority that Google is not the publisher of defamatory content produced by a third party, because the hyperlink facilitated access to the offending article.”
Even though Google was not found to be the main publisher of the defamatory material, the High Court has ordered the company pay for Mr Defteros’ legal costs incurred in pursuing his appeal.
“We feel totally vindicated. We took them on all the way to the High Court over a period in excess of six years,” the Melbourne lawyer said, then extended his gratitude to his entire legal team, in particular, David Gilbertson QC, Paul Heywood – Smith QC, Ted Guthrie, and Justin Castelan.
“We feel that our good family name has been preserved, not only in the law, but also within the community at large. We took this action as a matter of principle,” Mr Defteros stressed.
