The Internet portal, Yahoo!, has appealed to a US Federal Court to block a French court from enforcing a ruling that it must prevent Internet users in France from getting access to part of its site that sells Nazi memorabilia. Last month, a judge in Paris gave Yahoo! three months to implement the ruling or face a fine of $13,000 a day. The Nazi memorabilia is offered for sale on an auction site that Yahoo! runs in US, but not on the one that it operates it France.
Yahoo! has argued that it is impossible to prevent Internet users in France from gaining access to sites outside their country. Yahoo! has also objected to how the ruling would impinge on free speech rights. Although the company tries to remove any hate material that is put up on its site, it says that some of the Nazi material falls into a grey area.
A section of Yahoo!'s US auction site devoted to World War Two memorabilia contains Nazi relics such as a swastika T-shirt, an SS recruitment poster and a print of a watercolour painted by Adolf Hitler. Some collectors have argued these are all legitimate historical artefacts worthy of preservation. Yahoo! said that it expects it will be at least a few months before the US court rules on the matter.
