Defamation Law and Google Bombing

Steven J. Horowitz, Harvard Law School, has published the working paper, “Defusing a Google Bomb”. Here is the abstract.

Anonymous internet defamation is nothing new, but the recent Autoadmit controversy highlights one particularly difficult aspect of this problem: Google bombing. As private individuals are defamed on popular anonymous message boards, searches on Google and other engines return the defamatory posts as top hits for those individuals. This short essay suggests a notice and takedown solution modeled after the DMCA’s similar provisions. I argue that such a solution is much more effective for the Google bomb problem than for copyright infringement because the parties involved are much more likely to have similar legal resources than in copyright disputes.

Download the paper from SSRN here.