An Italian court has convicted 3 Google executives on criminal privacy violations because someone posted a nasty video to Google Video:

A judge in Milan, Italy, on Wednesday convicted three Google executives — chief legal officer David Drummond, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and former CFO George Reyes — of violating Italy’s privacy laws, a decision that Google is characterizing as an attack on Internet freedom.

The charges stem from a video that was uploaded to YouTube in Italy, back in September 2006, that depicts four high school boys in a classroom in Turin, Italy, taunting another boy with a mental disability.

Google received two requests to remove the video in early November, one from a user and one from the Italian Interior Ministry, and did so within 24 hours.

Nonetheless, Francesco Cajani, a prosecutor in Milan, filed suit against four Google employees for violating Italian privacy laws. All four were found not guilty of criminal defamation. The fourth, Arvind Desikan, formerly the head of Google Video in London, was acquitted of the privacy violation charges, unlike Drummond, Fleischer, and Reyes.

If I was running a service with user generated content, I would start denying access to Italian IPs.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this might have been driven in some manner or another by Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, who has control of something like 80% of the broadcast media in Italy, and might be unhappy with the competition for ad revenue and news.