Samuel Buffone, who moved from Ropes & Gray to the new boutique BuckleySandler just this week, said he was up at 2 a.m. on Wednesday digesting the reality that an Italian criminal court judge has convicted three Google executives and sentenced them to six months in prison for violating that country’s privacy laws. The executives, including Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president, David Drummond, will not serve prison time because of Italian rules calling for the commutation of short prison sentences for first-time offenders, according to the Wall Street Journal and CNN.
The other convicted executives are Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy officer, and George Reyes, the company’s chief financial officer.
Italian authorities indicted the executives after a user in 2006 posted a video on Google’s defunct video sharing platform, Google Video, showing kids teasing a disabled boy and tossing something at him, according to the WSJ. Prosecutors charged the executives with defaming the boy and violating his privacy rights.
