Is Google Afraid to Flex its Legal Muscle?

Upon searching for “Michel van Rijn” on Google, you’re greeted with something rather odd.

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

It links to a giant legal document which can be found here. Is Google afraid to flex its legal muscle? I sure hope not after buying YouTube.

After digging further into this issue, I’ve found out Michel van Rijn is an arts dealer, who ran a website to alert people of stolen art, and what goes on the underground art community. It turns out that some dealers who he unearthed weren’t too pleased with his findings, so they retaliated with death threats. They sued Google for libel, and had the link removed. Google settled, and the case never went to court. However this brings up another issue; is a hyperlink (a pointer to another website) illegal? According to wiki, a hyperlink is legal. In some countries, there has been discussion as to whether it was legal, but all cases ended up with the conclusion that it is not illegal. According to the website Google links to:

Answer: It probably isn’t, however, a few courts have now held that a hyperlink violates the law if it points to illegal material with the purpose of disseminating that illegal material:

* In the DeCSS case, Universal v. Reimerdes, the court barred 2600 Magazine from posting hyperlinks to DeCSS code because it found the magazine had linked for the purpose of disseminating a circumvention device. (See Anticircumvention (DMCA).) The court ruled that it could regulate the link because of its “function,” even if the link was also speech.
* In another case, Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, a Utah court found that linking to unauthorized copies of a text might be a contributory infringement of the work’s copyright. (The defendant in that case had previously posted unauthorized copies on its own site, then replaced the copies with hyperlinks to other sites.)

So why did Google buckle under the threat of legal action? Yahoo surely didn’t.