Google Versus the Law: Google’s Legal Adventures and Their Impact to the Evolution of European Information Law

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the major legal questions which emerge from Google’ dynamic presence in the Web. It is divided in four parts. The first part deals with the privacy implications which are born by Google’s various activities, primarily by its main function as a search engine, but also by more sophisticated tools, such as the Google Street View service. The second part presents the basic copyright and trademark issues which have been raised by Google’s services, such as the popular Google Library project, the Google news aggregator and its principal source of income the Google Adwords service. The third and the fourth part focus on two relatively new fields of litigation: the eventual liability of Google for civil tort due to its Google’s Suggest auto-completionsearch tool and competition law issues, such as the problematic of potential abuse of Google’s dominant position in the European market of search engine providers for the low ranking of the Websites of its competitors.

Keywords: Google, law, copyright, privacy, data protection, Europe, defamation, Internet, search engine, competition law