#1 . Italy is Not Following ITALY's Laws in this recent Google case, BUT is following  European Union's today effective sovereign of global privacy law.  Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence." The First Amendment’s distant cousin comes later, in Article 10. 
#2 In Europe Right of Privacy comes First, and Right of Free Speech second, whereas in the US it is the Reverse. In modern  European the law is a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi, referring to the reviled Nazi and East German secret police,  totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power. Had the Privacy laws been in effect earlier, WWII might never have happened.!!!!!!!  Few Realize that the Patriot Act surrendered many of our Privacy Rights to the Government, with NO APPARENT BENEFIT, a Very Totalitarian act.  Breed Fear and Terror, and convince  people they MUST PATRIOTICALLY  give up their Rights.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, there may be something to learn from the Italian episode. "This video was enormously controversial, widely seen and very upsetting," he said. "Sometimes, there are egregious acts and there should be some responsibility." 
"Google is digitizing the world and expecting the world to conform to Google’s norms and conduct"  said Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies and law at the University of Virginia. "That’s a terribly naïve view of privacy and responsibility."
Italy (and most parts of Europe) have been civilized for 2500 years, the US with  its abundance of Okies, Arkies, Appalachians, Cowboys, Shit Kickers, Jesus Freaks, Gang Bangers etc, etc , is 250 years old. The US thinks just because it is Rich, makes it Smart, and it sets the Rules. Me, I think I would Listen to the Adult, not the Bratty Kid !!!!! I favor the Europe view. 

WASHINGTON — “On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services. 
In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute. 
But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone. 
“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.” 
Google understands. 
“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.” 
But Ms. Wong said Google’s policies on invasion of privacy, like its policies on hate speech, pornography and extreme violence, were best applied uniformly around the world. Trying to meet all the differing local standards “will make you tear your hair out and be paralyzed.” 
The three Google executives were sentenced to six months in prison for failing to block a video showing an autistic boy being bullied by other students. The video was on line for two months in 2006, and was promptly removed after Google received a formal complaint. The prison sentences were suspended. 
Still, Judge Oscar Magi’s ruling, in effect, balanced privacy against free speech and ruled in favor of the former. And given the borderless quality of the Internet, that balance has the potential to affect nations that prefer to tilt toward the values protected by the First Amendment. 
“For many purposes, the European Union is today the effective sovereign of global privacy law,” Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote in their book “Who Controls the Internet?” in 2006. 
This may sound odd in America, where the First Amendment has pride of place in the Bill of Rights. In Europe, privacy comes first. 
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” The First Amendment’s distant cousin comes later, in Article 10. 
Americans like privacy, too, but they think about it in a different way, as an aspect of liberty and a protection against government overreaching, particularly into the home. Continental privacy protections, by contrast, focus on protecting people from having their lives exposed to public view, especially in the mass media. 
The title of a Yale Law Journal article by James Q. Whitman captured the tension: “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty.” And historical experience helps explain the differing priorities. 
“The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi,” Professor Cate said, referring to the reviled Nazi and East German secret police — totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. “We haven’t really lived through that in the United States,” he said. 
American experience has been entirely different, said Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France. “So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech,” he said. 
It was not until 1890 that Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis wrote “The Right to Privacy,” their groundbreaking Harvard Law Review article. Influential though it was, it came awfully late in the life of the republic. 
The word privacy does not appear in the Constitution, and, outside the context of government searches, the document has almost nothing to say about the concept. This was perhaps best demonstrated by how hard the Supreme Court had to work in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling that established a right to marital privacy. 
That right, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, was suggested by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments. The “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees,” he wrote, in a much-mocked passage. 
European courts, by contrast, have Article 8. 
In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights relied on it to rule that Princess Caroline of Monaco could block German magazines from publishing pictures of her — quite tame pictures — that had been taken in public. “I believe that the courts have to some extent and under American influence made a fetish of the freedom of the press,” Judge Bostjan M. Zupancic of Slovenia wrote in a concurrence. “It is time that the pendulum swung back to a different kind of balance between what is private and secluded and what is public and unshielded.” 
The differing conceptions can have profound consequences. “Europeans are likely to privilege privacy protection over both economic efficiency and speech,” Susan P. Crawford, who teaches Internet law at the University of Michigan, wrote in an e-mail message. “They’re willing to risk huge economic losses and erect trade barriers in order to protect privacy.” 
The Italian prosecution would be unimaginable in America. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 leaves online companies free of liability for transmitting most kinds of unlawful material supplied by others. Prosecutions for truthful speech on matters of public interest are almost certainly barred by the First Amendment. 
Still, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, there may be something to learn from the Italian episode. “This video was enormously controversial, widely seen and very upsetting,” he said. “Sometimes,” he added, “there are egregious acts and there should be some responsibility.” 
But Professor Crawford cautioned against thinking about the problem in categorical terms. Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model. 
And what Italian prosecutors labeled a battle over principle may well have had another goal. 
“Italian media is full of embarrassing revelations about both celebrities and ordinary people,” Professor Crawford wrote. “Any concern for privacy in this case is a pious cover for an (also naked) assertion of power over online companies.” 
In some ways the Italian video represents the easy case. Google was merely a conduit for other people’s information, and that may well be enough to protect it in most of Europe. 
The harder cases arise when Google is more active in gathering and disseminating information, as in its StreetView service, which provides ground-level panoramas gathered by cars with cameras on them. The program has generated legal challenges in Switzerland and Germany. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/weekinreview/28liptak.html
 

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