Do Google search results amount to content that the company "publishes" and is responsible for? One high court in Australia says yes — and the decision, if unchanged on appeal, could have far-reaching repercussions.

For starters, Google will be forced to pay $200,000 to music promoter Milorad Trkulja, the plaintiff in this case. Trkulja brought the suit in 2009 after Google refused to remove links to sites that claimed, incorrectly, that the promoter has connections to organized crime in Melbourne.

Google's stance, which makes a lot of technological sense and has been approved by other courtrooms around the world, is that it is not a publisher. Its search algorithm points to the most likely links; no human beings were involved in the presentation of your results.

"The sites in Google's search results are controlled by those sites' webmasters, not by Google," a company spokesperson wrote after the result. Which is exactly what it told Trkulja in 2009: contact the sites to have the offensive content removed. (He pursued that path as well, winning a similarly-sized libel award from Yahoo, which actually hosted one of the sites.)

The jury at the Supreme Court of Victoria agreed with Google up to a point. The company wasn't responsible for the results until Trkulja asked it to take them down, it said. (Read the decision in full here.) Because it stuck to its guns, Google must pay $200,000 in damages.

Naturally, Google is appealing the ruling. The result, if it stands, would not make Google responsible for all the Web's content, as some have claimed. But it may well force it to comply with every takedown notice it receives from an Australian citizen — and make the Internet Down Under look a lot thinner.

Image via iStock, Hillary Fox