In a landmark case, the Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina recently ruled that search engines Google and Yahoo! are generally not responsible for third party content that appears in online search results.  The Argentine Supreme Court said that search engines are only responsible for infringing third-party content if they have knowledge that the content is infringing and they fail to remove or block access to it.

Privacy allegations

The case, Belén Rodriguez v. Google, saw a former fashion model sue search engines Google and Yahoo! alleging that including links or thumbnails to pornographic photos of her violated her privacy and publicity rights.  In finding that the search engines were not liable, the Argentine Supreme Court may be the first case of its kind decided by the highest court of any country in South America.  

Precedent

'This is a very important precedent for Latin America, where liability of search engine websites regarding the content of third parties it’s almost an unexplored area by our Judges and laws,' said Ariela Agosin, a partner at Albagli Zaliasnik in Chile.