Oriental Press Group (“Oriental”) filed a civil lawsuit in 2015 against Google Inc., a search site headquartered in the United States, for defamation because Google’s websites blogspot.hk, groups.google.com and google.com.hk in February and March 2014 and from April to October 2015, respectively. Google Inc. has made three applications to the court for service outside this jurisdiction, and in the last application, the Court of Appeal of the High Court made a written ruling last year, dismissing Google Inc.’s application for service outside this jurisdiction. Google Inc.’s appeal was dismissed and costs were awarded to the Orient, and Google has paid HK$1.05 million to the Orient for part of the application.
The plaintiffs include Oriental Press Group Limited, Oriental Daily News & Printing Limited, and The Sun Newspaper & Printing Limited; the defendant is Google Inc. (later renamed Google LLC.). On October 26, 2015, Orient filed three separate complaints against blogspot.hk, groups.google.com and google.com.hk for alleged defamatory publication.
In the first and second petitions, Orient seeks damages and an injunction against the defendants from publishing or causing to be published or participating in the publication of those or similar statements and from providing personal information about the users, including their names, addresses, email addresses, identification numbers and IP addresses. In the third complaint, Eastern sought damages and an injunction against the defendants from publishing or causing to be published or participating in the publication of the defamatory words.
On October 20, 2016, Google Inc. applied to the court to overturn the overseas distribution permit, and the judge denied the application and ordered Google Inc. to pay costs.
The High Court judge ruled that it was undisputed that certain statements in the case were defamatory to the plaintiff. The plaintiff had notified the defendant of the existence of the defamatory statements on three occasions, in October 2013, February 2014 and April 2015, prior to filing the lawsuit, but the defendant failed to remove the defamatory statements and did not remove the defamatory statements from the website in question after receiving the notice, so it can be inferred that the plaintiff was involved in the defamatory statements.
Google Inc. filed an application for leave to appeal to the Court of First Instance on December 7, 2016, seeking to set aside the High Court judge’s order. On December 20 of the same year, Google Inc. filed another application for leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal, which granted leave to appeal in February 2017, and the hearing was held on December 12, 2017.
In his ruling, the Appellate Division judge said that the wording of the plaintiff’s complaint could constitute defamation, and that the trial judge had considered the evidence of the extent of publication and inferred that there was substantive publication, and that according to other cases, a company does not need to prove actual damages in a defamation case in order to sue, and that the plaintiff had proved that there was real and substantive infringement in Hong Kong in this overseas ticketing matter. and costs were awarded to Eastern.
Ultimately, in connection with the Court of Appeal’s approval in February 2017 and its judgment on February 6, 2018, Google Inc. paid HK$1.05 million in costs to Eastern.
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