Google forced to take proactive steps to remove Mosley images from search index in France

The Court of Cassation in Paris said Google had to do more than simply remove links to privacy-infringing images when notified about them by Mosley, according to media reports. Mosley has previously complained that Google does not do enough to prevent the re-posting of images found to have breached his privacy rights.

Google has to "remove and cease, for a period of five years beginning two months after this decision, the appearance of nine images identified by Max Mosley in the Google Images search engine results", the ruling said, according to a report by the Guardian.

Daphne Keller, Google's legal director and associate general counsel, previously told a Parliamentary committee in the UK that the company acted to remove links to infringing content when notified of its existence, but in a statement following the French court's ruling she said it opposed pre-emptive measures on grounds of censorship.

"This decision should worry those who champion the cause of freedom of expression on the internet," Keller said in a statement sent to Out-Law.com by the internet giant.

"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," she added.

Google has said that it will need to create a new filtering system to proactively identify and remove the nine images from its search rankings, the Guardian report said.

In 2011 Mosley won a French court ruling against the now defunct News of the World (NotW) after it was found the paper breached his privacy rights in the country. Copies of the paper were sold in France and contained a story about Mosley's participation in an orgy. The NotW had claimed the orgy was Nazi-themed.

Three years earlier the High Court in England had ruled that the NotW had infringed Mosley's privacy rights when it published the same story as well as a video of Mosley's attendance at the orgy. The High Court ordered the paper to pay Mosley £60,000 in damages. At the time the judge said the paper's allegation that Mosley's sex life had Nazi undertones was unproven and that the article was unjustified. Mosley is the son of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British fascists in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mosley previously lost a legal battle at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in which he sought a ruling on changes to UK privacy law. The Court rejected Mosley's argument that publishers should have to notify story subjects in advance of printing articles about them.

In weighing up individual's privacy rights and the rights of freedom of expression – both guaranteed rights under the European Convention on Human Rights – the ECHR said that introducing a prior notification requirement on publishers would have a "chilling effect" on free speech because it would give the subjects of stories the chance to obtain a court order preventing publication.