New Williams Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello has won a three and a half year battle with Internet giant Google over their hosting of fake profiles in his name on their social networking site, Orkut, and has been awarded a sum of half a million dollars minimum.

It appears that when the case was lodged in a Sao Paulo court in the middle of 2006, Google were told that they were facing fines of up to 600 dollars per day that they failed to remove the fake profiles, meaning that the lump sum Barrichello could walk away with may be a lot higher than the main judgement.