Xuxa Loses Lawsuit Against Google

Brazil Celebrity News

BRASILIA – Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice ruled in favor of Google in a legal battle brought by television personality Xuxa Meneghel, reported online media Wednesday. Xuxa sued Google in 2010 asking that the search giant stop indexing links to ‘pornographic’ images of the star.

Xuxa Loses Lawsuit Against Google

At issue are links to images and videos that appear when searching for the words Xuxa followed by pornografia or pedofilia (‘pornography’ or ‘pedophilia’ in English). That search returns links to multiple sites, such as YouTube, which feature scenes from the 1979 Brazilian film Amor Estranho Amor (Strange Love), where the then 16-year-old actress played a prostitute and appeared nude in an intimate scene with a 12-year-old boy.

Xuxa sued the company in 2010, asking the court to order Google to remove the images from the search results. At first, the court in Rio de Janeiro ruled in favor of the blond beauty. They ordered the company to pay a fine of R$7,700 reals (about $3,500 dollars) for each positive result to the search.

In Brazil, Google defended itself saying that it had no responsibility over aggregated content in internet searches.

“Search engines like Google are developed to reflect content and information available on the internet. These tools have the ability to take information directly from any webpage and index it to help internet users find information more easily,” read a company statement.

“Google does not produce, alter, edit, monitor or interfere with the information indexed by the search engine. Users who want some information changed or removed from the internet may contact the webmaster of that page to learn more about its policy of removing content,” continued the statement.

Google appealed the original ruling which favored Xuxa. The Superior Court of Justice ruled that search engines such as Google can not be forced to limit the results of searches, since they are only one means of access to content and not responsible for publishing it.

Xuxa can still appeal this decision.

The star, now 49, became famous at a young age when she worked as a model. She married the soccer star Pele and later went on to present programs for children.