Mosley v SARL Google: From London Damages to a French Search Case

In 2013 a French court heard Mosley v SARL Google. Max Mosley, former president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), sued to make the search engine Google remove images of him in a sadomasochistic sex act with several sex workers. The pictures had already been published by the News of the World, the British paper that has since closed. This is a case about what happens after adult sexual images are already public, brought against a search engine. It is not a description of the session, and it is not a method for keeping images online or slipping past a removal request. The argument is about indexing and taking results down.

The Google suit sat on an earlier win against the British press. In Mosley v News Group Newspapers, the English High Court held that the News of the World had invaded Mosley’s privacy. The court rejected the paper’s invention of a “Nazi-themed” private SM session and awarded him £60,000. The London judgment dealt with damages. It did not clear the material already on the open web.

Mosley therefore went to France and sued Google, asking the court to force removal of search results for the same SM images. That French case, the High Court win, and the later European Court of Human Rights ruling in Mosley v United Kingdom on prior notice, are pieces of one privacy story. European law can treat consensual sadomasochism as private life. After a tabloid loses on privacy, the person in the pictures can still be left fighting search indexes, mirror sites, and republication across borders.