Google employees convicted over Italy video upload

Google is set to appeal a decision by an Italian court to convict two senior executives and a former employee after finding them guilty of breach of privacy relating to a video uploaded to the Google Video service.

The case centered on a video clip of a disabled boy being bullied at school in 2006 that was uploaded to Google Video. It remained there for two months and was seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Prosecutors said Google breached the boy’s privacy rights by failing to prevent the video from being broadcast. Google claimed it removed the video within three hours of being notified about it by Italian authorities but the court handed three people six-month suspended prison sentences. Google called the decision “astonishing” because it said the convicted employees had nothing to do with the video.

This is not the first time Google has been in the dock in Italy.  Last year, a Rome court ruled in favour of commercial broadcaster Mediaset in a dispute with Google-owned video sharing site YouTube and ordered the immediate removal from YouTube’s servers of all illegally uploaded content.