Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc.’s top lawyer, David Drummond, appealed to a London audience last month to help fight censorship of the World Wide Web. He mentioned China, Turkey and Thailand as some of the worst offenders of free Internet speech.

Yet Italy is where prosecutors want Drummond to serve a yearlong prison term because of a 2006 video posting on Google. Prosecutors blame him and three other Google executives for not stopping teenaged boys in Turin from loading a 3-minute clip that they say violated Italy’s privacy law.

However extreme, that is but one example of the mishmash in the state of Internet law. Bedrock principles in one nation’s culture and law, say, free speech, barely count in a nation that values some other principle more, like privacy.

“Can we live in a world that has borderless communication technology and still have bordered law?” asks Eric Goldman, who teaches at Santa Clara University School of Law in California and tracks that very issue.

With a decade or two of that conflict behind us, the answer is, Who knows?

Consider that the man who used to run CompuServe’s German operations was convicted in 1998 for allowing child pornography to be distributed over the Internet, however unaware he was of the content. A German court set aside the conviction the following year, but only because no technology was available that could block such material.

Rulings Don’t Stick

In a French court, two fashion houses -- Sarl Louis Feraud International and Pierre Balmain SA-- won by default a 2001 case against a U.S.-based Web site for posting photos from their shows without permission. A French court said the New York firm, Viewfinder, had engaged in “parasitism” and slapped it with a fine. The houses came to U.S. courts to try to enforce the French ruling.

No way, said trial judge Gerard Lynch in Manhattan, who said the French decision was “repugnant to the public policy of New York.”

That ruling didn’t stick, either, because the 2d U.S. Court of Appeals in 2007 vacated it and sent the case back down for further findings. The parties settled, leaving the issue of enforcement unresolved.

Likewise, a French attempt to force Yahoo! Inc. to stop hosting an auction of Nazi memorabilia ended with no clear resolution by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California in 2004.

This month a Swiss government agency reported it was taking Google to administrative court because its Street View service doesn’t protect the privacy of people who may be pictured in it.

Deciding Responsibility

EBay Inc. wins some and loses some when sued by European companies like L’Oreal SA that try to hold the online auction house legally responsible when sellers offer counterfeit items for purchase.

Meanwhile in Germany, Wolfgang Werle, a convicted murderer, filed lawsuits there to force the media to stop calling him a convicted murderer. According to his lawyer, courts have said he’d served his time and was no longer a public figure vulnerable to the same sort of media coverage he received at the time of the 1990 murder of a famous Bavarian actor. Werle is also suing Wikimedia Foundation Inc., seeking anonymity.

The English language version of Wikipedia still identifies Werle as one of the men convicted of killing Walter Sedlmayr, while its German language counterpart doesn’t.

The foundation’s top lawyer, Mike Godwin, says that because Wikipedia has servers only within the U.S., it’s not bound by laws elsewhere. Besides, the online encyclopedia is written and edited by volunteers. Wikipedia’s volunteer English-speaking editors were free to reach a different decision than the German editors.

Google Case

Nothing shows the inability to resolve such disputes as dramatically as the Google case now unfolding in Milan against Drummond and three others from Google: global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, former chief financial officer George Reyes and Arvind Desikan, senior product marketing manager.

They’re being criminally prosecuted because four bullies filmed themselves taunting a 17-year-old classmate with Down syndrome. So amused were these guys, so pleased with their manliness, that they posted the act on Google Video. (That was before Google acquired YouTube.)

Not amused, authorities charged the four Google executives with defamation for not blocking the posting. They’re being tried in absentia at an off-and-on procedure due to end next month.

Liability for Postings

It doesn’t count that Google says it removed the clip within 24 hours of receiving complaints because, prosecutors say, it spent almost two months in Google’s “funniest videos” category. It doesn’t matter that the company used the clip to help authorities locate the bullies for punishment.

It doesn’t even matter that the European Union says Internet service providers should be insulated from liability for content from third parties. The prosecutor this week asked the judge to find the foursome guilty and put three of them in prison for one year. Desikan’s sentence should be six months, he argued.

None of this is comprehensible to American sensibilities. And yes, I know. We don’t rule the world and we should respect the laws of other nations.

In fact, among the few principles that can be nailed down slightly more securely than Jello is this one: If a company is operating in a foreign country, it must obey the laws there.

The U.S. and EU have moved to protect Internet hosts from the wrongdoing of those who post, a principle adopted in Italian law. But as we see in the trial of the Google executives, that principle isn’t so solid, either.

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 26, 2009 21:00 EST