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Three executives were convicted Wednesday of violating Italian privacy laws in a ruling that the company denounced as an "astonishing" attack at freedom of expression on the Internet.
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The case involves online videos showing an autistic boy being bullied with byclassmates in Turin,
which were posted in 2006 on Video, an online video-sharing service that the company ran before its acquisition of YouTube.
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Prosecutors charred that the videos violated Italian personal private protections.
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They said the clips were removing only after complaints from Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing people with Down syndrome.
whose name was mentioned in the videos.
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"We are definitely satisfied that someone has to take responsibility for this violating of privacy,"
said Guido Camera, a lawyer for Vivi Down.
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The company said it planed to appeal, warned that the verdicts raised serious questions about the viability of user-generated content platforms like YouTube in Italy
and potentially elsewhere in Europe.
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"If company employee like me can be held criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform,
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when they had absolute nothing to do with the video in question, (67)then our liability is limited," said one of the three executives, Peter Fleischer, the company"s chief privacy counsel.
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"The decision today therefore raises broader questions as the continued operation of many lnternet platforms that are the essential foundations of freedom of expression in the digitalage,"
he said in a statement.
Video-sharing services like Video and YouTube generally rely on users to notify them of potentially problematic content, which is then taken down if it violates the terms of service.