Three Google executives convicted in Italy of privacy law violations had their convictions overturned by an appeals court today. Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, and former Chief Financial Officer George Reyes were convicted in February 2010 because of a video showing teenagers beating up an autistic classmate.

That video was uploaded to Google Video Italia in 2006, and Google pulled it down within hours due to complaints. Yet the Google executives were convicted because the company was allegedly too slow in removing it. The verdict could have set a dangerous precedent for Internet companies that provide platforms for user-generated content, as we noted in our story at the time of their conviction.

Sites like YouTube (or Facebook or Twitter) rely on users to follow rules for posting content. The sites take content down after it's published if rules were violated, but they rarely review content before it is posted. Criminal cases targeting executives (rather than the companies that employ them) in such matters are rare.

The three executives had been sentenced to six-month suspended sentences, but that decision was overturned by an appeals court in Milan. "The original verdict raised alarms about threats to Internet freedom in Italy," the New York Times noted today. "Google and many other Internet companies have consistently maintained that they cannot, and should not, be required to review the content of user-generated material before it is posted on their sites. Google insists that it acted swiftly to take down the video in question after being alerted to it, on grounds that the content violated its terms of service. Google said Friday that the successful appeal had vindicated its position."

Google's policy manager in Italy, Giorgia Abeltino, hailed the verdict while saying "our thoughts continue to be with the family [of the autistic boy in the video], who have been through the ordeal."

The Italian court's reasoning for overturning the convictions "was not immediately clear, because Italian courts publish detailed explanations of verdicts several weeks or months after the actual decision," the Times reported. Marco Ricolfi, co-director of the Nexa Center for Internet and Society in Turin, was quoted as saying "The decision is welcome in that it removes a substantial threat to digital platforms and to the contributions to speech coming from them."