Court: Google Suggest Feature Not Responsible For Encouraging Software Piracy

Mar 23, 2007 at 10:52am ET by Barry Schwartz

Belgian company loses lawsuit against Google from IT World reports that Google has won a suit brought against them by ServersCheck, a Belgian company. The company complained that the Google Suggest feature was helping people find pirated versions of its software.

ServersCheck said that Google Suggest returned results for “ServersCheck Crack,” ServersCheck Serial,” and other suggested searches of illegal versions of the ServersCheck products, when a user began to enter in “ServersCheck” into Google Suggest.

ServersCheck sued Google on May 17, 2006. The Commercial Court in Leuven, Belgium, ruled that Google did not facilitate illegal activity through Google Suggest.

On March 1, the Commercial Court in Leuven, Belgium, dismissed the suit, saying Google can’t be found liable for finding Web pages that may be involved in illegal activity based on search terms. The court also rejected an argument the Suggest feature offered a misleading advertisement, since that’s not the intended function of Suggest, said Trevor Callaghan, Google’s senior product counsel for Europe.

It is expected that ServersCheck will appeal the case.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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