Upheld injunction against Google and Yahoo

By Estudio Chaloupka

An Appeal Court upheld an injunction that orders Google and Yahoo to block all search results related to the case of a missing young woman.

In first instance the woman asked for an injunction against Google, Yahoo Argentina and Mircosoft Corporation for the blocking on their search engines of those results related to the case in which she was involved between April 30 and May 3 of 2012: without warning her family and as a direct consequence of a psychiatric illness, she suffered a mental crisis and went missing home for a few days until she was found by police officers in Cariló, a beach resort town located in the administrative division of Pinamar.

She also requested that, in those web searches that contained her name, Google and Yahoo do not suggest to add the words "missing", "Pinamar" and "missing Pinamar".

The injunction was granted and the defendants appealed arguing that "the disputed news is true" and "the claim must be directed against those responsible of the websites that published the disputed content" since they are "not their editors or authors".

Nevertheless, on February 13 the National Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, stating that the "truthfulness of the news is not what is being discussed" and that its "irrelevant" that the defendants are editors or authors of the content linked through their search engines because that it´s not "what they are being accused of"

The decision added that the search results reported by the plaintiff were directly involved to a psychiatric illness protected by the Mental Health Law (invoked as a basis for the injunction), which states that people with mental illnesses have the right to preserve their identity and not be discriminated.

For last, the Court asserted the injunction is plausible in light of the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court in the María Belén Rodríguez case.