Google ordered by French court to drop sex images of ex-F1 chief Max Mosley

Google has been ordered to block its search engine in France from providing links to images of an orgy involving Max Mosley, the former Formula One chief, in a ruling handed down by a Paris court.

The owner of the world’s most-used internet search engine said the ruling would force it to create a “censorship machine”, warning that it would set a dangerous legal precedent for internet freedom.

It contends that the search engine is merely a platform that delivers links to content and it should not be responsible for policing them.

The ruling, which could influence broader European efforts to tighten web privacy rules, relates to nine widely circulated images taken from a video of the orgy that was filmed by the now defunct News of the World.

Mr Mosley had sued in an effort to get Google in France to filter the images automatically and delete any links to them.

Paris’s Tribunal de Grande Instance court ruled in his favour and said Google must find a way to remove links to the images. It gave the company two months to comply with the decision, which will then be binding for five years, and ordered it to pay Mr Mosley €1 (84p) in damages and €5,000 in other legal fees.

The internet giant called the ruling “troubling” and said it would require building a new software filter to catch new versions of the posted images continuously and remove them.

“This decision should worry those who champion the cause of freedom of expression on the internet,” said Daphne Keller, Google’s associate general counsel. “Even though we already provide a fast and effective way of removing unlawful material from our search index, the French court has instructed us to build what we believe amounts to a censorship machine,”

Google is appealing against the ruling.

Mr Mosley, who is the son of the late fascist leader Oswald Mosley, won a £60,000 breach-of-privacy award in a British court in 2008 from the News of the World for publishing the story on a Nazi-themed “orgy” along with a video.

A judge ruled there was no Nazi theme and the story was not in the public interest. Mr Mosley won a similar ruling in France in 2011 when a judge ordered News Corp. to pay €32,000 in fines and fees over the story.

Since then, the images have become widely available online. Google has said it is willing to remove individual images and links when requested and has done so hundreds of times.

“We have removed hundreds of pages for Mr Mosley, and stand ready to remove others he identifies,” Miss Keller said when the court case opened in September. “But the law does not support Mr Mosley’s demand for the construction of an unprecedented new internet censorship tool.”

Mr Mosley insisted that Google should go further and simply remove them automatically as it does for content such as child pornography.

“The case is not about censuring the content of the internet, it’s about complying with the court decision that already ruled it was a breach of intimacy,” said Clara Zerbib, a lawyer for Mr Mosley.

Mr Mosley also filed suit against Google in Germany, seeking to force the company to use automatic filters that eliminate any thumbnail images of the sex video, as well as links in search results.