The EU’s Central Court of Justice today found that a search engine like Google is not required to remove links to someone’s personal information, provided the publication of that data is legal.

Search engines only point to data that has been published on the Internet, and should not be required to filter results simply because someone is displeased with the results, according to Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen. Doing so would be tantamount to censorship, he concluded.

Jääskinen’s opinion(Opens in a new window) is preliminary; the full court still has to make a final ruling. But in a blog post(Opens in a new window), Google said it was “encouraged because the case is key to free expression online.”

The case dates back to 1998, when a Spanish newspaper published an article that discussed social security debts and mentioned a specific person. The newspaper’s archives were eventually published online, and the person in question discovered that a search for his name produced the article from 1998.

“He argued that the proceedings had been concluded and resolved many years earlier and were now of no relevance,” the court said today, but the newspaper’s publisher refused to remove it. He then turned to Google, which also refused to remove links to the story, so the man filed a complaint with Spanish data protection authorities.

In July 2010, the agency ordered Google to remove mention of the man’s name from search results, but Google appealed, resulting in today’s opinion.

Spanish law “does not establish a general ‘right to be forgotten,'” the court said today.

“Let us be clear: we think it’s important for people to be able to control the information that they post online themselves,” Google said. “If you post something online about yourself, you should have the right to remove it or take it somewhere else. If someone else posts illegal defamatory content about you, we’ll remove it from our index with a legal order.”

“In this case we’re simply challenging the notion that information that is demonstrably legal – and that continues to be publicly available on the web – can be censored,” the company argued.

In general, tech companies like Google only remove or censor information when it is required by law. Google regularly reports how many government requests for removal it has received. Between July and December 2012, for example, Google received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content, up from the 1,811 requests made regarding 18,070 during the first half of 2012.