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Max Mosley sues Google to censor 'orgy' video references
Mosley bemoans search engine's refusal to prevent appearance of defamatory material on internet
MAX MOSLEY is suing Google in France and Germany to force the web giant to remove references to his sex life from its search results. Mosley told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics yesterday that he has already spent "well over £500,000" and hired lawyers in 22 countries to erase all mention of what he calls a "party". In Germany alone he has had defamatory material removed from 193 websites.
The video in question was made for the News of the World by a prostitute who attended the party. The tabloid later headlined its story: "F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with five hookers". Mosley took the News of the World to court, where a judge ruled there was no evidence of a Nazi theme and that the millionaire's privacy had been breached.
At the Leveson Inquiry, Mosley likened the internet to "a sort of Wild West with its own rules which the courts cannot touch".
According to the Financial Times he believes individual websites are not the problem; without Google they could not be found by internet users. "The fundamental thing is that Google could stop this appearing but they don't or won't as a matter of principle... The really dangerous things are the search engines."
A Google spokesman told The Guardian: "Google's search results reflect the information available on billions of web pages on the internet. We don't, and can't, control what others post online, but when we're told that a specific page is illegal under a court order, we move quickly to remove it from our search results."
Elsewhere in his testimony, Mosley got what Simon Hoggart in The Guardian describes as "perhaps only the second laugh of the day" when he speculated on the sex life of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre.
Mosley recalled how Dacre had once accused him of "unimaginable depravity".
"That reflects badly on his imagination," Mosley said. "[Dacre] may have some sort of strange sex life, but it is not up to me to go into his bedroom and film him and then write about it...
"He is completely naive, obviously, about sex." ·
