Google Snubs Brazilian Court Orders Too

Google’s motto is “Dont be Evil.” It should be “Give the Finger to Court Orders.” Google willingly kowtows to China’s laws in order to do business there, but when it comes to complying with court orders from the US and Brazil, Google refuses to cooperate.

From Bloomberg here:

Google Inc., the owner of Brazil’s most-used online community site, may face a criminal probe for distribution of child pornography and racist materials by its users, lawyers for the attorney general said.

The lawyers, saying Google failed to comply with a court order to turn over information on where the material comes from, said they will ask a federal judge to authorize a police investigation of the Mountain View, California-based company’s Brazilian unit. The service, Orkut, is being used to violate Brazilian law, said prosecutors Sergio Suiama and Karen Kahn.

“Orkut has become a paradise for pedophiles, who solicit sex with childen and distribute pornographic material,” Kahn said at a news conference in Sao Paulo.

Google, the world’s most-used search engine, and News Corp. face growing pressure from law enforcement on the use of its services for some explicit content and the risk of exposure to sexual predators to teenagers and children who post their profiles and diaries on MySpace.com in the U.S. and Orkut in Brazil.

In a letter to prosecutors yesterday, Google said its Brazilian unit bears no responsibility for the content of Orkut, the biggest social networking service in Brazil with about 8 million Brazilian users. The unit’s lawyer, Durval de Noronha Goyos Jr., said all data on Orkut is hosted on servers in the U.S., which are managed by Google Inc. Any request for information from Google must be directed to the parent company, he wrote.