An Italian court convicted three Google executives of privacy violations Wednesday because they did not act quickly enough to pull down an video online that showed bullies abusing an autistic boy.

The case was being closely watched around the world due to its implications for Internet freedom.

In the first such criminal trial of its kind, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three to a six-month suspended sentence and absolved them of defamation charges. A fourth defendant, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.

Google called the decision “astonishing” and said it would appeal.

“The judge has decided I’m primarily responsible for the actions of some teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google video,” Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, who was convicted in absentia, said in a statement.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, had said it considered the trial a threat to freedom on the Internet because it could force providers to attempt an impossible task — prescreening the thousands of hours of footage uploaded every day onto sites like YouTube.

“We will appeal this astonishing decision,” Google spokesman Bill Echikson said at the courthouse. “We are deeply troubled by this decision. It attacks the principles of freedom on which the Internet was built.”

The precedent for Google’s defense was set a long time ago.  Basically, the concept of “guns don’t kill people, people do” set the standard.  Now, that argument was rather simple.  A gun is an inanimate object.  It does nothing but fire a projectile.  If you lock a gun safely away, unloaded, you never have to look at it to see that it’s not doing any harm.

The internet however, has never been that simple.  From its inception, it was something people assumed was something safe, and anonymous.  It was a place where people could go to live out their wildest fantasies and be a person they never could, or would, be in real life.  The problem was even then that this was never true.  You’re never anonymous, and your actions quite often will eventually come back to you.  It also became a dangerous place because people use the assumed anonymity as a tool to entice victims of all kinds of crimes.

And any time anyone mentioned some way of addressing those crimes, people threw fits about “the principles of freedom on which the Internet was built”.

Slowly but surely over the years some levels of protections started seeping into the internet.  The most obvious was the piracy issues over music.  Now, this is where things get dicey for Google.  Try uploading a Prince video to Google.  I double dog dare ya.  I uploaded a copy of David Bowie’s Saturday Night Live performance in 1980 or so and got my entire account deleted.  No warning, just shut down.

But, in a case where a horrid crime was committed, Google says it’s impossible to monitor their videos in a timely manner.  That didn’t fly too well in Italy.  And, it doesn’t fly with me.  A crime is a crime.  There is no right to privacy when committing a crime.  To assume the internet is some magical place where anything goes, including crimes, is a farce that grown men like the executives at Google know is not true.  Now, to assume Google is even the least bit concerned about anything other than lawsuits, once again, go look for a video by Prince on Google.  Now, watch this:

Google allows people to upload the song so long as it’s not the video.  Piracy?  Who needs it.  I just stream Youtube a lot.  Google knows damn well Prince doesn’t want his stuff on Youtube.  That’s piracy in its purest form.  The only difference is the lawsuits went after the videos.  So, for those same people to argue that showing a video of an assault is OK because they waited for someone else to tell them it was there just falls back on that same “it’s not piracy if it’s not an exact copy”, and, “guns don’t kill people”.  It’s not the mechanics, it’s the intent.  Google intends to allow anything on their site until someone else complains.  By that point, the intent quite often has already been fulfilled.  If it’s to embarrass another kid, it’s done.  Then it’s yanked.  If it’s to show how strong some thug is assaulting an innocent kid, it’s done, everyone knows, then it’s pulled.

Sorry Google, I’m with the Italians on this.  Aiding and abetting in a crime is not justified by lack of staff.  In this day and age, it’s too easy to filter out stuff being uploaded.  That just leaves the un-obvious stuff to be screened.  Sure, it’s a profit drag, but everyone else in the world has to worry about legal liability, there’s no reason Google can just ignore it.  And, the internet will be just as “free” as it was before.  There are all kinds of ways of transmitting your message, a public video forum is just one of many.

And, I assure you folks at Google, if my seven year old had stumbled on something like that trying to watch videos of John Wall, Italy would not be the only country you’d be having legal problems with.  If I set my filter to “G”, you better make damn sure I only get “G” stuff.

Sure, it’s not as easy as just setting up a server and letting everyone run wild with it.  But, that’s just tough.