Summary and highlights regarding the November 2000 French Court ruling against Yahoo! and the importance of complying with International Laws.

What Happened and what was the ruling?

An auction site hosted on Yahoo! displayed images of and offered for sale Nazi memorabilia. The ruling in France ordered the French arm of Yahoo! to prevent French users from accessing sites selling Nazi memorabilia (located on US servers). French law bans the sale of objects with racist overtones which includes Nazi items.

Yahoo!'s Sue Jackson said: "It is obviously our concern. The implication of the ruling is that, regardless of location, all Websites could become subject to the (local) laws and social norms of all the countries around the world. . . Clearly we believe this would have a chilling effect on the growth of the Internet. . . There are more than 180 countries in the world and if every Internet company in the world has to abide the laws of each of those countries, it is obvious how stifling that would be."
November 21, 2000 Web posted at: 10:26 AM EST (1526 GMT) By Joe Clancy, CNN.com Europe writer. www.cnn.com (see first listing below).

Yahoo! Resolutions.

Yahoo says France can't police auctions. Yahoo filed for a declaratory judgment in a U.S. federal court to show that the French government has no jurisdiction over the company's operations. Further, Greg Wrenn, an associate general counsel at Yahoo said that the human and economic resources to block, filter and police content on the company's site would be difficult and ineffective. By Jim Hu Special to ZDNet December 21, 2000 12:13 PM PT (see second listing below).

They have already taken appropriate steps and this case has effected hosting services world wide. Today every hosting service contract that I've read includes wording that disallows the publication of any content that may be deemed offensive or slanderous. Further, the host is the sole judge of this content and is allowed to discontinue services (remove the site) for any reason they determine.

One reason the matter has been so vigorously contested is that Yahoo! already has a French site, which abides by local laws and bans auctions of all Nazi material. Yahoo! Germany observes a similar ban in that country. Yahoo! also has a clear policy against hate-related items and enforces a ban in all countries on items deemed to be advocating the use of violence. However, it doesn't believe that historical items like Nazi flags or battle medals fall into that category.

In order to satisfy the terms of this order, (and reverse the bad publicity)

YAHOO! France has:

1) modified and amplified its terms of use accessible by clicking on the link "Find out about Yahoo!" ("tout savoir sur Yahoo!") appearing at the bottom of each page on the site. The following paragraph has been added: "Finally, if in the context of a search conducted on www.yahoo.fr from a tree structure or keywords, the result of the search is to point to sites, pages or forums whose title and/or content contravenes French law, considering notably that Yahoo! France has no control over the Content of these sites and external sources (including Content referenced on other Yahoo! Sites and Services worldwide), you must desist from viewing the site concerned or you may be subject to the penalties provided in French law or legal action may be brought against you"

2) put in place a warning when a search by tree structure (categories) is requested, worded as follows : "Warning : if you continue this search on Yahoo! US, you could be invited to view revisionist sites of which the content contravenes French law and the viewing of which could lead to prosecution."

Concluding Remarks

Yahoo! did the right thing in fighting the court ruling on the grounds of jurisdiction. However, their stock prices fell and the bad publicty brought to bear on the company required some kind of reasonable compliance.

The issue of company sites and even web hosting companies complying with laws of different countries is very important to E-Commerce because negative publicity can directly effect their ability to do business. While you may be offering services locally, your web presence is accessible by an International audience. Even in a Business-to-Business situation, others may chose to go elsewhere and if the company has shareholders, stock values may drop. Ultimately though, this whole issue relates directly to the edicts of the ClueTrain Manifesto. The Web is a large collection of individuals with tremendous power to make or break a company. One individual can communicate with everyone connected to the World Wide Web. That's a lot of people. Best to keep this in mind.

Web sites accessed in December 2001 and deserving of credit in this analysis are as follows:

• http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/11/21/france.yahoo/index.html
  
• http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2667454,00.html
  
• http://www.istf.org/archive/yahoo_france.html
  
• http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/headlines/2000/400.html