India Court Defers Facebook, Google Hearing - Wall Street Journal

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India Court Defers Facebook, Google Hearing - Wall Street Journal Mar 13th 2012, 07:21 By R. JAI KRISHNA NEW DELHI -- An Indian court Tuesday deferred until May 23 hearing of a case against 20 companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Facebook Inc., which face charges that they failed to censor objectionable content from their websites. The case will now be heard by Metropolitan Magistrate Jay Thareja at the Patiala House courts, a notice at the court premises showed. It was earlier slated to be heard by Judge Sudesh Kumar, another metropolitan magistrate at the same court. The court notice didn't give any reason for the change. Executives of all companies have been exempted from appearing in person by an earlier higher court order. The case follows a complaint from a journalist, Vinay Rai, who wants the companies to be prosecuted for alleged offenses such as criminal conspiracy, defamation, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and race and obscene content, among others. The case is the highest-stakes example yet of the controversy in India over what role Internet companies should have in policing content on the Web. If convicted, executives from the companies could face jail time and the companies could face fines, lawyers following the case said. Most companies have argued that India's information-technology law protects them from liability for content posted by users. The companies acknowledged they have a responsibility to remove content, in some cases, but only if notified about it. The companies have argued that monitoring their services without receiving complaints wouldn't be feasible, given the amounts of traffic on their sites, and would stifle free speech. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have petitioned to quash the case. The Indian unit of Yahoo Inc. has already successfully appealed to be removed from the case. —Amol Sharma contributed to this article. Write to R. Jai Krishna at krishna.jai@dowjones.com Corrections & Amplifications An earlier version of this story misstated the date of the next hearing in the first paragraph. The correct date is May 23. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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