Case Watch: Top Argentine Court Blazes a Trail on Online Free Expression

In "Case Watch" reports, lawyers at the Open Society Justice Initiative provide analysis of notable court decisions and cases that relate to our work to advance human rights law around the world.

On October 28, the Supreme Court of Argentina issued a groundbreaking judgment on the question of whether search engines are liable for unlawful third-party content appearing in search results. The ruling, in Belén Rodriguez v. Google, is one of the first of its kind in Latin America and will have important repercussions for Internet freedom in Argentina and beyond.

The Case

Maria Belén Rodriguez, an Argentine fashion model, sued Google and Yahoo! Argentina in connection with search results that linked her to several pornographic websites. The claimant argued that even though it was the third-party sites that had violated her reputation, privacy, and image rights, the search engines had contributed to such primary violations by including links to those sites in their search results. In addition, she claimed that by including copies of photographs of her (known as thumbnails) in their search results, the defendants had violated her right to control her image under Argentine copyright laws. She demanded that the search engines omit such search results in the future and pay damages for the harm caused.

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