As newspapers continue to develop their web presence and consider charging for online, media law has as ever been playing ‘catch up’ with the technological changes.

Following an important ruling by Mr Justice Eady last month, we still have only three High Court decisions giving guidance on the libel liability of internet intermediaries – Godfrey v Demon Internet (2001), Bunt v Tilley (2007), and now Metropolitan International Schools Ltd v Google Inc. and others (2009).

The latest ruling primarily concerned the liability (or, as it happened, non-liability) of California-based search giant Google Inc.

The claimant complained another company had published defamatory bulletin board postings on its website. Anyone who entered certain words in Google’s search engine obtained results that included hyperlinks to the defamatory statements plus a ‘snippet’ of the defamatory text.

The judge emphasised that Google’s search results are passively created by automated web crawling, indexing and ranking processes.

He decided Google did not have the necessary mental element to make it liable as a ‘publisher’ of the contentious words – even though its search results included the defamatory snippet and hyperlinks to the defamatory bulletin boards.

He took into account that Google has no control over which search terms are entered by users and cannot effectively block particular searches without also disabling many entirely lawful search results.

Faced with complex legal arguments about statutes and regulations which surprisingly have not yet been clearly interpreted in case law, he chose to base his decision on English common law rules as to who is a ‘publisher’.

He said: “I prefer to reach my conclusion by reference to straightforward common law principles, albeit adapted to the new environment of the internet, and in particular I attach importance to the absence of knowledge on the part of [Google Inc.] in relation to the offending material prior to the claimant’s complaint and, moreover, the absence of any conduct on its part thereafter which could properly be characterised as authorisation or acquiescence in continuing publication…..it is impossible to characterise the state of mind of any relevant employee as amounting to authorisation, approval or acquiescence.”

Google escaped liability. It is worth remembering, however, that a newspaper website is in an entirely different position from a search engine and is clearly a ‘publisher’ of its own content under common law rules.

Science writer Simon Singh suffered a further setback in his libel battle against the British Chiropractic Association regarding an article published in the Guardian. In a piece intended to be only comment, Singh said there was “not a jot of evidence” for certain claims made by the BCA, and claimed the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments”.

Earlier, Mr Justice Eady ruled those words were assertions of fact, not merely comment that might otherwise be defensible as fair comment.

Now the Court of Appeal has refused Singh’s written application for permission to appeal the ruling. Singh’s decision on whether to follow up with an oral application for permission to appeal was expected this week.

His position does not look great. With more than £100,000 reportedly already spent on defending the claim, the case is a sobering example of how a few unfortunate words may scupper the media-friendly fair comment defence and how our libel laws can have a distinctly chilling effect upon even scientific debate.

Finally, some better news for press photographers. Scotland Yard has issued new guidance to police officers to be cautious about using new anti-terrorism powers against journalists. It follows two issues of controversy.

First, Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 created an offence of eliciting, publishing or communicating information about certain persons, including police officers, which is “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. Many feared photographing police officers in everyday situations could be criminalised.

Second, there was concern over officers using stop and search powers under Sections 43 and 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to challenge press photographers going about their lawful work.

The new Scotland Yard guidance reportedly warns officers a court order may be needed before they may see certain material created for the purposes of journalism.

It also says officers may not delete or destroy images during search procedures, and makes clear press photographers are legally free to photograph public events and police personnel.