Want an example of PC at its worst or just how weird the French are?
For her writeup, French Blogger Fined $2,000 for Restaurant Review, Too Prominent on Google.
The EU in general and the French in particular are apparently not too fond of Google. So one has to wonder, was it the lady's review or Google the judge was going after?
The real message here is blog what you want but use a local or European search engine.
A blogger eats in an Italian restaurant in southwestern France. She thinks the food is bad, the service even worse, and she writes up a review that is not glowing, to put it mildly.We first spotted this article at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/.
It’s a scenario that plays out daily in the cyberworld. Hair in a dish of pasta? Many would snap a photo and share it on Twitter or Facebook. An insufferable waiter? Blog it out.
But this blogger, a French woman named Caroline Doudet who runs “Cultur'elle,” got sued for it by the restaurant Il Giardino. And a judge has ruled that she must amend the title of her piece – because with it the post appears too prominently in Google search results – and that she owes $2,000 in damages.
The judge, according to court documents reported by the BBC, said that her blog, with over 3,000 followers, came up as the fourth result any time someone searched for the restaurant in Google. Therefore, she [the judge] reasoned, the title should be changed so “place to avoid” was less prominent.
Doudet made very good point to the local newspaper Sud Ouest that if bloggers don’t have the liberty to write bad reviews, good reviews become essentially meaningless.
The EU in general and the French in particular are apparently not too fond of Google. So one has to wonder, was it the lady's review or Google the judge was going after?
The real message here is blog what you want but use a local or European search engine.
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