Trkulja v Google LLC

The High Court of Australia considered an appeal by Mr Trkulja against Google LLC (substituted for Google Inc) concerning a defamation proceeding. Mr Trkulja alleged that search results and autocomplete predictions generated by Google's search engine were defamatory. The central dispute revolved around whether Google had published the allegedly defamatory material and whether this material was capable of conveying defamatory imputations to an ordinary reasonable person.

The legal issues before the High Court included whether the search results and autocomplete predictions constituted a publication by Google capable of conveying defamatory imputations. The court was also required to determine whether Mr Trkulja's defamation proceeding had no real prospect of success, which was the basis for the Court of Appeal's decision to dismiss the proceeding summarily.

The High Court reasoned that the search results, particularly those generated by searches for terms like "melbourne criminal underworld figure" and "melbourne criminal underworld photos," were capable of conveying to an ordinary reasonable person that there was an opprobrious connection between those terms and Mr Trkulja. The court found that the "snippets" accompanying the search results, and the reference to Mr Trkulja's earlier defamation proceedings, did not necessarily ameliorate the defamatory capacity of the material. Consequently, the High Court concluded that the Court of Appeal erred in finding the material incapable of conveying the pleaded defamatory imputations and in holding that the proceeding had no real prospect of success.

The High Court allowed the appeal, set aside the orders of the Court of Appeal, and ordered that the appeal to the Court of Appeal be dismissed with costs. Google LLC was ordered to pay Mr Trkulja's costs of the appeal to the High Court.