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Censorship Your Rights Online

Deutsche Bahn to Sue Google 526

Many readers including this Anonymous Coward have written about this case: "After the DB-Deutsche Bahn (German railway comp.) won a case against Dutch ISP xs4all to remove 2 articles that were hosted on one of their servers, the DB now is going to sue Google (Wednesday) and probably in 2 days time Yahoo! and Altavista. Infoworld has an article about it. More background information about previous attempts to censor the same site can be found here and here's list of mirrors." And Yes, "Access is Forbidden."
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Deutsche Bahn to Sue Google

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  • by DtMM ( 80317 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @08:46AM (#3357626)
    Here's Google's cache [216.239.35.100] of the broken link.
  • Not the cache. (Score:5, Informative)

    by perlyking ( 198166 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @08:48AM (#3357636) Homepage
    Just to clarify its not just the cache, its actually the links and its not to their site but articles that detail how to cut power on parts of the railway system.
    Its not *their* site they want removing.
  • by Munelight ( 192694 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @08:51AM (#3357653)
    From what I understand, they were about how to sabotage the railway system, and were put up to protest the transportation of radioactive materials using said railway system.
  • Contents (Score:2, Informative)

    by hoofie ( 201045 ) <mickey@MOSCOWmouse.com minus city> on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @08:55AM (#3357684)
    As far as I can tell, the site may refer to transport of Nuclear Waste Material via Train across Germany. There has been massive demonstrations against this before in Germany. Possibly they details Deutsche Bahnhof's schedules, movement plans etc. - I can see why DB wouldn't want that published.

    In the UK, the train movements from power stations etc. are available and are on regular schedules. The security around them isn't very high, but then the flask the material is carried in weighs quite a few tons, is solid steel, and you'd need an extremely expensive facility just to open it again.
  • Re:subsidiaries (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @08:58AM (#3357700) Homepage Journal
    Why not read the Grundgesetz [hu-berlin.de], the constitution of Germany? You may be interested in article 5, which guarantees freedom of speech, details what it extends to (e.g. explicitly includes writing and pictures, but also the right to acquire information) and where the limits are (violation of other laws and defamation).

  • Re:Lawsuit? (Score:3, Informative)

    by DickPhallus ( 472621 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @09:22AM (#3357822)
    Ya, but the cache is still accessible, and the cache might hang around for a while longer than the links, giving the chance for people to mirror things.
  • by Sapphon ( 214287 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @09:44AM (#3357994) Journal
    As someone who works for a major German telecommunications company, I was directly involved in this, in that my office was responsible for giving the DB a 'heads up' about the site (whether or not we found it I'm not sure).
    I was asked to take a look at the portion of the site relating to my companies products (which was a guide on how to sabotage them to disrupt train services), and essentially the most elegant intructions given were "Pry the cover off, bash the insides to pieces with a rock, and/or fill it up with dirt/glue/etc".

    This was only a few weeks ago too, and this is the first I've heard of any action the DB has taken, but I am quite impressed at the speed at which this has progressed.

    (Details have been left vague to give me some semblance of anonyminity, protect my job, etc)
  • Re:subsidiaries (Score:2, Informative)

    by ethereal ( 13958 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @09:45AM (#3358004) Journal
    Second, imagine some radical group in the US. posting instructions on how to hijack some planes and fly them into skyscrapers on the internet. Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out? There goes your "free speech"... q.e.d.

    The really funny thing is that this is all documented very well in any number of books at your local public library, like The Running Man [wikipedia.com] (for the crashing) and various other true and fictional books to describe how to do the hijacking itself. The average American has seen plenty of movies that involve airplane hijackings; figuring out how to do it yourself (note: this is not something I'm advocating here) would not be that difficult. Especially if you don't even use guns to do it.

    In the U.S. you can still buy The Anarchist's Cookbook [fortunecity.com] even! But you may have to go to court to defend that right, just like xs4all is in this case. So there is no absolute freedom of speech without at least the money to back it up.

  • Freenet (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @09:50AM (#3358046)
    Seems to me... this is what Freenet is for.
    Just toss the document into Freenet and publish
    its key on the website.
  • by tempmpi ( 233132 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @09:58AM (#3358127)
    Art. 5

    (1) Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten. Die Pressefreiheit und die Freiheit der Berichterstattung durch Rundfunk und Film werden gewährleistet. Eine Zensur findet nicht statt.

    (1) Everyone has the right freely to express and to disseminate his opinion by speech, writing and pictures and freely to inform himself from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by radio and motion pictures are guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.
    (2) Diese Rechte finden ihre Schranken in den Vorschriften der allgemeinen Gesetze, den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen zum Schutze der Jugend und in dem Recht der persönlichen Ehre.

    (2) These rights are limited by the provisions of the general laws, the provisions of law for the protection of youth and by the right to inviolability of personal honor.
    Translation from: http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/germ/ggeng.ht ml
    Why the freespeech in germany isn't as free as in the USA is because of the second part. Most of the restrictions of the free speech are because the content of the speech is against the constiution.
  • by sdo1 ( 213835 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @10:05AM (#3358180) Journal
    Tom, you're confused about the United States Constitution. The ammendments were added after the original document was drafted (and thus they're "ammendments") and they're numbered in the order in which they were added. It's a fairly difficult process to have the consitution ammended (it requires a 2/3 vote of both houses of the legislature).

    At the moment there are 27 ammendments with some VERY important ones further down the list. For example, the 15th Ammendment gave all citizens the right to vote regardless of race or color.

    It just seems that the First, Second, and Fourth are the ones most commonly under attack in the United States (see sig). It doesn't mean that they get priority over other ammendments.

    -S
  • by sqlrob ( 173498 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @10:07AM (#3358200)
    What freedom of speech? It doesn't exist.

    Read Article 5 Section 2 here [uni-wuerzburg.de]. Rather pulls the "free" out of "free speech" doesn't it?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @10:41AM (#3358416)
    You ever been to Germany? They have plenty of museums etc on the subject so information on the Nazis and what happened is freely available. They are however very quick to pounce on anything that may be glorifying the Nazis in anyway AFAIK but I don't live there I only visited.
  • and archive.org too? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @11:55AM (#3358900)
    http://web.archive.org/web/20020208065004/www.xs4a ll.nl/~tank/radikal/
  • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @01:06PM (#3359380)
    > but there have always been some things you couldn't do. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is the classic example.

    That is a fallacious argument. You might want to read this to see why.

    http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:www.fatalblin dness.com/FREEDOM990628.htm [216.239.39.100]
  • by alvar-f ( 228501 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @04:34PM (#3361080) Homepage Journal
    Hi,

    today I had a phone talk with Christian Schreyer, the legal advisor of Deutsche Bahn.

    Deutsche Bahn will sue all, who create a mirror of this pages; if it's not possible sue them (e.g. free speech laws in the US or whatelse), they want to block the pages at the german access providers: There is a filter system [odem.org] in development, which will be able to block all unwanted URLs.
    The stalking-horse to establish these filter system (called "Filterpilot"), which uses a combination of routing and transparent proxying, are nazi websites. Denying holocaust is illegal in germany and there is a wide front against nazis; they use this to establish filterpilot at all border gateways.

    The district government of Düsseldorf, which is the outrider in the case of net censorship in germany, sais: "If we want to prohibit milk drinking, we have first test this with two milk bottles."

    It is naive to think, that "Filterpilot" will remain in Germany. It's a commercial development and not only in germany there are lot if interested organisations in such a filter: remember MPAA, IPFI, Scientology, ...

    At ODEM [odem.org] we have a petition against provider side filter systems. Please support us and sign [odem.org] the Declaration for freedom of information in the internet [odem.org].


  • by yppiz ( 574466 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @05:21PM (#3361400) Homepage
    Here's a much more useful archive of the site than Google's:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20020208065004/http:/ /w ww.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/

    The Internet Archive also has past versions:

    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xs4all.n l/ ~tank/radikal/

    The main page for the Internet Archive's multi-year web collection is web.archive.org

    --Pat /zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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