Google to appeal against jurisdiction in tycoon's lawsuit
Judge rules tech giant's libel fight with tycoon should go to a higher court to bring 'enlightenment' to an 'uneasy area' of defamation law
Google has been given permission to appeal against a court's ruling that Hong Kong has jurisdiction to hear entertainment tycoon Albert Yeung Sau-shing's defamation lawsuit against the US technology giant.
In a written judgment, Court of First Instance Deputy Judge Madam Justice Marlene Ng May-ling said: "It is inappropriate for this court to make an unseemly spectacle of standing in the way of an appeal that hopefully will bring enlightenment by the Court of Appeal in this new and uneasy area of defamation law."
The search giant sought permission to appeal after Ng allowed Yeung to go ahead with the case in August, having heard arguments from both parties last year.
Yeung, founder of a company that manages some of Hong Kong's most famous celebrities, wants to sue the US technology giant because the "autocomplete" function of its search engine linked him to triad gangs.
He wants a court to order Google to remove the defamatory suggestions and to compensate him.
In last year's hearing, Google had argued the suggestions were generated by a computer algorithm or process based on the most frequent combinations of terms that people searched for.
