Google wins its latest case against the 'right to be forgotten'

The "right to be forgotten" isn't guaranteed worldwide, according to a new court ruling.

Google on Tuesday won the latest lawsuit over its search results when a court in Japan ruled that the company did not need to remove links to articles written about a man arrested on child pornography charges, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The "right to be forgotten" is a term coined by a European Union court in 2014. Europeans can request that information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive" be removed from the search engine.

In Europe, Google has adjusted its search engine to comply with the right individuals have to remove themselves from Google searches. The European Union wants the rule to apply globally, and a ruling in France last year determined that it would apply to Google's worldwide domains, not just Google.fr.

In Japan, however, the court wasn't committed to the concept. The court determined that Google results are a form of speech and that restricting them could be a restriction on speech, according to the Wall Street Journal. Instead, the court decided that requests to remove search results should be weighed on a case-by-case basis that would evaluate the benefit of having information available to the public compared to any damage suffered by the person appearing in the search results. The ruling didn't directly mention the European Union's term for the concept.

“We’re pleased that with these latest rulings, the Supreme Court has unanimously recognized, based on existing privacy and defamation laws, that any decision to delete information from search results should prioritize the public’s right to information," a Google spokesperson told Mashable.