Appeals Court Rejects Silly Case Against Google Over Search Results Summary

Legal Issues

from the its-own-form-of-self-help dept

The Sixth Circuit appeals court easily upheld a lower court ruling dismissing a ridiculous lawsuit against Google and others last week. The lawsuit was filed by a guy named Colin O’Kroley, and the summary in the ruling explains the situation pretty well:

Colin O?Kroley googled himself and did not like the results. ?Texas Advance Sheet,? an entry read, followed by the words ?indecency with a child in Trial Court Cause N . . . Colin O?Kroley v Pringle.? … Truth be told, O?Kroley was never involved in a case about indecency with a child. What had happened was that his case, O?Kroley v. Pringle, was listed immediately after another case, a child-indecency case, on the Texas Advance Sheet, a service that summarizes Texas judicial opinions. If users clicked the Google link they would have seen how the Texas Advance Sheet works and would have seen that the two cases had no relation. But if they did not click the link and stayed on Google, they would see only the name of his case and the description of the other case separated by an ellipsis.

Claiming ?severe mental anguish? from the listing, O?Kroley sued Google (and a number of other entities) for $19,200,000,000,000 (that?s trillion), on causes of action ranging from ?libel? to ?invasion of privacy,? from ?failure to provide due process? to ?cruel and unusual punishment,? from ?cyber-bullying? to ?psychological torture.?

The court is not impressed. The case against Google is rejected in large part because Section 230 of the CDA clearly protects Google. And this was true even though O’Kroley also asked the court to throw out CDA 230 “as a simple matter of logic.” That’s not how all this works. The other defendants got out even easier, seeing as O’Kroley apparently never served them. In fact, the court finds most of O’Kroley’s legal arguments to be a waste of time, including trying to add Georgetown University as a defendant after a law school class said it planned to teach this case.

O?Kroley raises several other points on appeal, ranging from the meritless to the frivolous. On the meritless side: He ?requests a court appointed attorney,? …, but he has not shown the ?exceptional circumstances? needed to appoint one…. On the frivolous side: He asks us to strike down the Communications Decency Act (?as a simple matter of logic?); he claims violations of the Eighteenth Amendment (the former prohibition on alcohol repealed long before the Internet came into being); he asks us to add Georgetown University as a defendant (because it might be using this case in its ?Robots and Law? class); and he contends the judges below were ?biased? against him (because ?[t]hey may be ignorant about the English language?)…. To restate some claims is to reject them.

But, as Judge Jeffrey Sutton wryly notes at the end of the opinion, all is not lost for O’Kroley. Thanks to this lawsuit, the search result that caused him so much anguish has been pushed down the listings in favor of stories about this stupid lawsuit.

In most respects, O?Kroley didn?t accomplish much in suing Google and the other defendants. He didn?t win. He didn?t collect a dime. And the search result about ?indecency with a child? remains publicly available. All is not lost, however. Since filing the case, Google users searching for ?Colin O?Kroley? no longer see the objectionable search result at the top of the list. Now the top hits all involve this case (there is even a Wikipedia entry on it). So: Even assuming two premises of this lawsuit are true?that there are Internet users other than Colin O?Kroley searching ?Colin O?Kroley? and that they look only at the Google previews rather than clicking on and exploring the links?it?s not likely that anyone will ever see the offending listing at the root of this lawsuit. Each age has its own form of self-help.

Each age has its own form of self-help, indeed.

Filed Under: cda 230, colin o'kroley, search results, search summaries, section 230
Companies: google