Buenos Aires Attorney Martin Leguizamon, 48, has taken on the local versions of the Google and Yahoo in the names of many of Argentina’s best-known actors, models, sports personalities and judges. 110 major public figures in all have secured a court order restraining the Argentine versions of the two search engines from serving up search results on their names. The suit purportedly stems from the abundance of pornographic, defamatory or false websites that are summoned from the search engine. To comply, Yahoo.com.ar has restricted its local engine, when searching for “Diego Maradona” Argentines will simply find the message “Due to a court order requested by private parties, we find ourselves obliged to temporarily suspend all or some of the results related to this search” and a link to major media outlets’ news stories. Each plantiff is asking for a sum between 100,000 and 400,000 pesos ($30,000-$120,000). While Leguizamon claims the case is about character assasination, reps for Google believe it is about freedom of information. A spokesperson for Google Argentina was quoted in Time Magazine as saying, “It would be like suing the newsstand for what appears in the newspapers it sells. Or demanding the newsstand vendor to tear out offending pages from the newspapers. The lawsuits should be against the websites carrying the information, not us.”
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