A French appeal court has ruled in favour of Yahoo in the long running dispute between the company and two groups of anti-semitism campaigners. The latest case was an attempt by the Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League to have Yahoo held liable for promoting and selling Nazi memorabilia.
In the original case, which threw up all kinds of fascinating jurisdictional issues, a French court ordered Yahoo to install software filters to block access for French residents to the section of the website offering the Nazi items for sale. This triggered righteous indignant moral outrage in the US about a French court daring to challenge the first amendment rights of a US company. Court cases in the US followed where the courts declared a French court could have no jurisdiction over a US company, operating a server on US soil.
We ended up with a kind of judicial stand off where the US courts said the French had no jurisdiction and the French courts said they did have jurisdiction on the grounds that they had the right to prevent anyone, including a foreign company, offering Nazi memorabilia for sale in France. They had a point too.
Yahoo did have a slight problem, though. The part of the website offering the Nazi items was written in French. So in the thick of all this lawyering, they quietly dropped the Nazi sales, whilst declaring it had nothing to do with the court case and that they would continue on principle to fight through the courts for the right of US companies to operate freely.
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