A French court has told Internet portal Yahoo! to make it impossible for web surfers in France to gain access to sales of Nazi memorabilia which appear on one of the web sites it hosts. Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez told the firm the auctions were "an offence to the collective memory of the country".
Yahoo! said the French court had set a precedent which endangered the development of the Internet across the globe. "An identical stand by judges in foreign countries would oblige French operators of Internet sites to comply with the laws of more than 100 countries," Yahoo!’s lawyer Cristophe Pecnard said in a statement. "Such a functioning of the justice system at international level constitutes a risk to the development of the Internet in France and the rest of the world," he said.
He said "the real question" was whether or not a French jurisdiction could rule on "the English-language content of a US site, run by a US firm subject to US law, for the sole reason that French users have access via Internet".
Yahoo! has been ordered to report back on July 24 to explain the measures it has taken to prevent the French from participating in the sales. The company was also ordered to pay 10,000 francs in costs to the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism and the Union of French Jewish Students, who took the case.
It is not the first time a European court has tried to apply its country's laws to a site hosted outside its territory. Two years ago, a German judge gave a two-year suspended sentence to a German manager of the US Internet company CompuServe, a subsidiary of America On Line, after finding him guilty of not stopping German Internet users accessing illegal pornography. However that ruling was eventually overturned by a higher court last year.
