Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California An Italian court convicted three Google Inc. executives Wednesday of criminal charges for breach of privacy. David Drummond , Google's chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, its global privacy counsel, and George Reyes , a former executive, were given six-month suspended prison sentences after being found guilty of violating the Italian privacy code. The Google executives were convicted for not removing a video uploaded to Google Video in 2006, showing an autistic boy in Turin being beaten and insulted by teenage bullies at school. The video was up for two months, during which it was viewed 5,500 times. Google Italy pulled it down two hours after being notified by police, following complaints by the boy's father and Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing individuals with Down syndrome . The uploader and several of her classemates were sentenced to ten months community service by a Turin court. Danny O'Brien , international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco (an international non-profit digital rights advocacy group), described the decision as a "threat". "If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your Web site can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to prescreen everything anyone says on their Web site before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt", he said.
Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California An Italian court convicted three Google Inc. executives Wednesday of criminal charges for breach of privacy. , Google's chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, its global privacy counsel, and , a former executive, were given six-month suspended prison sentences after being found guilty of violating the Italian privacy code. The Google executives were convicted for not removing a video uploaded to in 2006, showing an boy in being beaten and insulted by teenage bullies at school. The video was up for two months, during which it was viewed 5,500 times. Google Italy pulled it down two hours after being notified by police, following complaints by the boy's father and Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing individuals with . The uploader and several of her classemates were sentenced to ten months community service by a Turin court. , international outreach coordinator for the of San Francisco (an international non-profit digital rights advocacy group), described the decision as a "threat". "If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your Web site can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to prescreen everything anyone says on their Web site before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt", he said.
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David Drummond
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George Reyes
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Google Video
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autistic boy in Turin
boy in
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Down syndrome
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Danny O'Brien
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Electronic Frontier Foundation