First, let me ask, Is this technically possible? They’re having a hell of a time trying to prevent minors from finding internet boobies. The best they’ve come up with is credit card systems, or filters that are imprecise (Damn machine counts :rolleyes: ) What could they do, IP number tagging (Anonymizer anyone).
If Yahoo can’t figure out how to do it, then what? I kinda like the idea behind the First Amendment, where any idiotic idea has equal access to the spotlight. Where the “NAACP” ( www.naacp.org ) and “Stormfront” ( www.stormfront.org )[sup]1[/sup] have equal access to have their message heard, deliberated and critizised, just like “I Love Bacon” ( www.ilovebacon.com )! Will Yahoo start dumping links to those websites. How about the ones encoraging the French to change their standard language to English?
I don’t want France deciding which ideas are dangerous any more that Pat Robertson, Joe Lieberman, or Oral Bill[sup]2[/sup].
Oh, I have now clue how the title can possibly relate to the subject. I just had “This Land is Your Land” bouncing in my head.
[sub]1. Though this is probably needlessly injecting another controversy in this thread, the complaint the French have is that Yahoo is letting people buy Nazi propoganda and such from their Auctions site. Anyway, the Reader probably has very good reason to monitor the board for Hate Speech nonsense. Lawsuits and filters being among them.
Bloom County’s Bill the Cat had become a preacher in the 1980s warning us against penguin lust. Dangerous.[/sub]
Oddly enough, I am writing (or supposed to be writing) a paper which likens the Internet to an oral tradition myth…it reflects common humanity in a way that us immortal and unstoppable.
Frankly the judge in France can tell Yahoo to so whatever they want, but there isn’t really much he can do to make Yahoo do anything.
If France is serious about upholding their speech laws, they could set up a China style country-wide firewall, but it wouldn’t do much good. Proxy servers and anonymizers make short work of country wide blocking.
And if the French really want to see whatever, they can use the Freenet program. Freenet is a little like napster, but it works with all manners of information and it is anonymous on all sides. You can share information that is illegal because of your country’s speech laws without anyone being able to trace it to you.
So in the end there isn’t a lot, short of severing physical wires, that a country can do to keep people off parts of the Internet. And there isn’t any way to keep people from posting certain stuff, either, because what is illegal in one place is legal in another.
First, is it legal(part A)?
Can a french judge tell a US company what to do? Merely that people can access Yahoo in France does not mean that Yahoo is actually in France. I mean, I don’t really need to explain this to you, but come on. The internet isn’t a location. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Secondly, is it legal(part B)?
Do the French have the right to sell Nazi paraphenelia in France? Do they have the right to sell it outside France? If so, what right does the judge have to ban it from being sold?
Third, is it enforceable?
You brought this up in the OP, SterlingNorth, but I must ask as well. How will Yahoo do this? What about Ebay? What about ANY online auction site? Human kidneys have been sold (or at least attempted). Same with babies. Heck, even Mir was auctioned off at one point. I say caveat emptor and be done with it.
People will find a way to sell even illegal things. I wouldn’t even dream of buying these things. But they have a legitimate use as an historical item. Let them be sold, if people want them to be. Put a levy on them for all I care, I’m not buying them.
The U.S. has similar legislation that tries to force its laws on foreign sovereign states. A good example is the Helms-Burton Act. This would probably work in the same way.
While they can’t go after Yahoo in the U.S. directly they can go after anything that company owns inside french jurisdiction, including http://www.yahoo.fr . If they want to take it a step further they could go after not just the company but the owners as well.
Firstly, this is not about free speech. The French law in question prohibits the sale of Nazi paraphernalia in France. It does not prohibit the dissemination of Nazi or neo-Nazi ideas and this is not about whether French people can have access to hate sites such as the one referred to in the OP. (Germany, OTOH, does have laws against expressing Nazi views and books such as Mein Kampf are banned.)
Secondly, it is perfectly legal. Most countries have laws against selling something or other. In the USA, for example, it is illegal to buy or sell cannabis. What would happen if a Netherlands-based* website started selling cannabis mail order to Americans? How would a US court respond?
Thirdly, as Eggs a la Ted points out, the USA is not above introducing extraterritorial legislation of its own. Whereas France’s extraterritorial legislation is designed to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, Helms-Burton is designed to punish the USA’s poorer neighbour for having a political system that many Americans disapprove of.
Fourthly, there are a number of ways in which it might be enforcable: directly against any of Yahoo’s business operations in France, if there are any. IIRC they moved their French operation out when this judgement loomed. It could also be enforced indirectly against any legal person based in France and does any business with Yahoo. This is basically how Helms-Burton works.
Fifthly (and notwithstanding my first point), Europe has a different history and political culture from the USA. Much of Europe has been under Nazi occupation within living memory and many Europeans believe that preventing that kind of thing is more important than free speech, just as many Americans believe that preventing the production and dissemination of child pornography is more important than free speech.
For example, the draft European Charter of Fundamental Rights permits “limitation” on the exercise of the right to free speech as long as it is “provided for by law and … subject to the principle of proportionality, … necessary and genuinely meet[s] objectives of general interest recognized by the [European] Union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others” (ibid, Art. 52.1). That is a pretty far cry from “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”
*I realise this isn’t a fair reflection of NL law on the subject, I am making a rhetorical point.
If a company has registered offices in another country, that company is subject to the law of that country. The principle isn’t complicated. Does Yahoo have a presence in France ?: http://fr.docs.yahoo.com/rp/contact.html
It is technically possible – why else make the decision – although Yahoo are currently quoting up to a 70% error possibility in screening. That will change.
IMHO, the French have every right to enforce their laws in their country. Yahoo can make a cheap buck elsewhere.
Can Yahoo enforce this? Of course! After the Nazi memorabilia transaction is complete they can e-mail the winner a picture of some gorgeous nekkid blond with the caption reading, “Voulez-vous couchet avec moi?”
If he responds “Oui,oui!” Voila! Obviously he’s French and Yahoo can notify him that his transaction cannot be completed. If he responds, “I don’t now what you said,babe,but give me sum more,” then we know he’s just your everyday American redneck exercising his right to free speech.
You know, it’s a wonder no one at the FBI has tried to recruit me yet.
re: the practicality of preventing people in France from accessing Nazi-related paraphernalia:
Someone (the French judge?) made the point that if Yahoo can target-market Francophone banner ads, they ought to be able to likewise screen French viewers from certain areas.
Last time this cropped up I had a quick look at the language options in IE5. There were 5 different settings for French (French - French / Canadian / Swiss / errrr…) so one possibility is for Yahoo to screen out French-French and argue they at least doing something.
Don’t have to be Einstein to get around that so I guess they will go the IP / ISP route. Should be interesting – this is, obviously, all new ground.
Of course, none of this will thwart the determined but at least the law is clearer.
I am sorry for lumping laws against selling Nazi memorabilia with those preventing pro-Nazi speech. I had assumed that France was one of the many European nations with laws against Nazi speech, and that these laws are an extention of that.
That said, you would think that France could just tell their people “you can’t buy that”, and leave it at that. I’ve seen martial arts catalogues and stuff that have little disclaimers by some of the weapons saying “We can’t sell this to Californians.”
sven, I don’t think you were that unreasonable to lump the things together: I believe that although there is no ban on hate speech per se in France (and the far-right FN has been successful in elections at the local level) the law under discussion goes a bit further than prohibiting the sale of the goods.
As far as I can ascertain from the British and French press (and we all know how precise newspapers are about details like this :)), the prohibition is on something like “offering Nazi memerobilia for sale”. In other words, you can display it but you can’t sell it and the offence lies somewhere in the middle.
All Yahoo really need to do to indulge this decision is to set up the HTML code in order to prohibit IP’s from France from accessing those Nazi auctions. It is really irrelevant anyway. A French user can access a proxy from another country (such as US’s Anonymizer) and access those offending sites anyway. What will the judge do then, ban proxies?
No, they’re not. If Yahoo! completes a sale on their site, the product doesn’t suddenly appear at the buyer’s computer. It still has to be mailed. Surely France already has a law against mailing Nazi items into France? So why do they need this law (or judgement, or whatever)? There’s a big difference between prohibiting Yahoo! from selling an item and prohibiting Yahoo! from discussing the sale of an item.
I think that the Internet was one of the major factors in bringing down the Soviet Empire, which had much more experience in fighting free speech than French judges. This judge actually immitates the Nazis in fofbidding things. The most stable countries in the world are those with most actual freedoms. It’s easy to start on this slippery slope: first, you “forbid” Yahoo auctions, pretty soon you burn books. You never know where to stop.
peace, that’s nonsense. As I explained in my earlier post, we have different attitudes to free speech in Europe. France is just as stable, free and democratic as the USA. Banning harmful material–child pornography, for example–does not lead inexorably to a total loss of freedom.
And the collapse of the Soviet Union happened before the Internet was really up and running.