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The Clash between Web Content and Local Laws

The Yahoo! Case

Shani Wexler

Yahoo! is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in California.

Through its United States-based website yahoo.com, Yahoo! makes available a variety
of Internet services. One of them was an auction site which presented every day
hundreds of Nazi objects for sale on the Web. France, Germany, and other countries
:have laws that make it a crime to exhibit for sale objects relating to Nazism
Sometime in early April 2000, the League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism
(LICRA) filed a lawsuit against Yahoo in France. LICRA based in Paris, sought
enforcement of French laws making the offering of Nazi memorabilia a hate crime,
:claiming, as the Judge Jean-Jacques described it, that

Exhibition of Nazi objects for purposes of sale constitutes a violation"

."of France law ,and even more an affront […] to the Jewish faith

]For the full ruling see: http://www.juriscom.net/txt/jurisfr/cti/yauctions20000522.htm[

This case, which was debated lengthily and has undergone many instances, raises a
number of significant issues. Jurisdictional issues raised include the extent to which
the "effects test", typically applied to establish jurisdiction in tort cases, applies in web
content cases. Technological issues raised include the potential role of geo-location
filtering. Is geo-location filtering a flawed technical measure offering no substantive
assistance to countries seeking to enforce their laws over the "borderless" Internet, or
can it afford a means for those countries to maintain their cultural values and more
without seeking to impose them on the rest of the world. A border question this case
pose is whether litigation in multiple for a all over the world is the best way to resolve
the international disputes that are arising with increasing frequency over the clash
.between web content and local laws
In the course, as in life, we are busy focusing on all the advantages of the modern
world and how the unique, borderless nature of the Internet makes our life much more
comfortable. In this essay I wanted to show a bit of the other side of reality and to
emphasize the difficulty of dealing with borderless problems raise of the endless
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development of the Internet world. As we can see, the unique nature of the Internet,
that we keep praising, has given birth to a controversy unforeseen when a lot of laws
were enacted. If that is the case, on the side of the development of the Internet, we can
not stop trying to preserve the principles of international comity – principles that the
.uncertainties of Internet breakthrough may fundamentally endanger
The interaction between the Internet and the traditional legal doctrines in the legal
system has been the subject of considerable debate, both in case law and scholarly
works. As I see it, one of the biggest challenges of the Internet is determining whether
we can solve a particular problem by applying exiting legal principals to the digital
.realm, or whether only the creation of new legal doctrine will suffice
Most of the judges concluded their analysis of the comity issue in Yahoo! case by
noting that there are no international standards governing the regulation of the online
content, hooping that they would be developed to provide guidance for courts in the
future. While establishing such guidelines is undeniably difficult, there is a certainty
that cases similar to the Yahoo-LICRA dispute will continue to challenge the
international legal system [For example, Google v China case, which deals with the
operating of a filter search engine in China (that censors pornographic & 'politically
sensitive' search results). This case mainly relates to the technological issues that I
discussed earlier. For more information see:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100022124/google-vs-china-does-the-
/.internet-giant-really-deserve-our-praise]
I believe that the Yahoo! case show how far we have to go in resolving how
law principles do or should work on the international Internet and illustrate the
importance off addressing these issues as a global community. Without restructure
certain principles governing international jurisdiction and online content available to
the world market, we may be locked in senseless conflict for years, instead of
developing the tremendous potential of the Internet as a means for truly global
.communication

For more information about the Yahoo! case and the legal issues it raises see:
http://files.grimmelmann.net/cases/Yahoo.pdf