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."
Just out of curiosity... (Score:0, Interesting)
Not again (Score:2, Interesting)
OTOH, these are very legal concerns that the linked pages contain information that, in the hands of the wrong party could be dangerous to their operations, and being a public utility, they have to be concerned.
This is iteresting because it has dire implications on page linking in general.
subsidiaries (Score:1, Interesting)
And the interesting part is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Have these people not been paying attention lately?
Wayback (Score:2, Interesting)
Not suing in America (Score:3, Interesting)
Dont they realize... (Score:4, Interesting)
By now dozens of people have mirrored the site, and the possibility of it going away forever has diminished greatly.
Fools.
Re:subsidiaries (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you mean by "a company such as Google"? If you mean "a company which is popular with geeks and Slashdotters" - well, you're right, in that some of the shine may gradually rub off their geek-friendly, free-speech protecting image. OTOH, plenty of large well-known corporations do business with China, say, or in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,.. ( insert your favourite repressive non-democratic regime...) IBM organised the Holocaust [google.com], you know, and Cisco built and support the Great Firewall of China [google.com] (and who knows who supplies the software tools that pull out Falun Gong-related email from the wire and queue a request for the secret police to pay the poster a visit at 4am?) (actually, it's probably Free software: but that's morally defensible, in that the Free software community are not getting rich supporting repression.)
Re:And the interesting part is... (Score:1, Interesting)
These "Autonome" have a point, but ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Posting instructions of how to commit crimes (sabotage in this case) should be prohibited across boarders. The poloitical background of this is that there is a very fierce anti-nuclear-power movement in germany supportet by 'left' activists.
Think of Greenpeace activists with no mind about inocent third parties and you'll get the picture.
I hate the "Bahns" miserable missmanagement (I use the train on a regular basis here in germany) and I shure as hell oppose to nuclear power but none the less, these people are criminals and they are a shame to peacefull resitance against "Atomkraft".
Sueing a searchengine is of course somewhat of a twist, but I hope this can raise and clarify some issues concerning morally doubtfull internet content and at least leverage trans-european law for this. I might help to know that the german gouverment holds large shares of the "Deutsche Bahn".
Re:Not the cache. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just like Napster weren't responsible for the copyrighted music that it's users were sharing?
Re:subsidiaries (Score:2, Interesting)
I did not confuse Deutsche Bahn with the German government. I was worried that German law enables Deutsche Bahn to file this lawsuit and expect to win it.
You're probably right, and that is a sad fact. Unfortunately, there is presently an overwhelming psuedo-patriotism in the United States today. These monkey spanks act without thought and support Ashcroft et al in their pursuit of limiting our freedom -- which is the most unpatriotic thing one could do.
Host Name Change (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news, www.xs4all.nl [xs4all.nl] will change to www.xs4allexceptcertainanarchistpublications.nl [xs4allexce...cations.nl] to represent recent events.
Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:
As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.
Re:subsidiaries (Score:3, Interesting)
Free speech is not a blanket clause to let you say whatever you want.
The first amendment is still bound within the confines of the law. For example, it's illegal to threaten the lives of certain government officials. No first amendment argument is gonna help there.
The FBI might go after said site. They might go after sites with similar content, in hopes of getting to a network behind it. But I highly doubt they would go after Google for merely indexing it. That's like suing the phone company for listing a criminal in the phone book.
A couple of facts worth pointing out (Score:2, Interesting)
2. The Dutch court has made a 'tussenvonnis' (mid-sentence?). XS4ALL has said to await the final judgement.
Re:Not again (Score:3, Interesting)
Blocking a page about some idea to sabotage is not going to make such extremists go away or stop their actions.
Bricks are meant to build houses. Yet, you can use bricks to maim people.
On the other hand, guidebooks for destroying railroad tracks server no other purpose than destroying railroad tracks in attempts to disrupt the service, with the unfortunate possibility of killing people.
Your analogy is too simplistic to be considered any valid. Free speech needs not be associated with destruction and killings. For this would definitely put and end to free speech.
Oh, I know some Germans who would disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no accounting for taste, anyway.
The obvious point is, if it's shown on German TV and Germans apparently like to watch it, it doesn't seem to be too insulting to Germans, now does it? (So much for your attempt at political correctness.)
You want to see something *really* politically incorrect about WWII? Try the British comedy "Allo Allo"...you know, the series with the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klump", a gay German tank commander, a Prussian general whose idea of politics is to shoot French peasants and so on. (And again, my wife loves it, as do I.)
Cheers,
Ethelred [grantham.de]
Re:subsidiaries (Score:4, Interesting)
True. This wouldn't happen in the USA. It's like suing Napster for providing the infrastructure to share songs... oh wait... damn.
right, boys and girls, time for counterstrike (Score:1, Interesting)
If you're feeling in the mood, e-mail DB indicating that the Internet has eliminated the ability to suppress speech, and provide links to said sites, pointing out that people will create more and more instances of these sites (on servers hosted by various countries) until the lawsuit is withdrawn.
Make sure you indicate quite clearly that you are in complete agreement that acts of sabotage are inappropriate, illegal and reprehensible (even if you sympathise with the environmentalist cause, this isn't relevant here), but that this has nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with freedom of information.
Re:The whole story. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:subsidiaries (Score:3, Interesting)
Did the September 11th hijackers visit such a helpful web site to learn how to hijack planes? No? Then what harm can putting the information up have? The bad guys already know. Can putting the information up potentially help? Certainly. I wish more bad guys would put their evil plans up on the web. Then the FBI could read the documents, identify the security weaknesses the bad guys are planning on using and fix the security weaknesses.
Criminals are perfectly capable and willing to spread censored information amoung themselves. After all, if you've decided to sacrifice your life to kill innocents, what's going to stop you from making some photocopies?
Re:subsidiaries (Score:3, Interesting)
Phones have lots of uses. So does Google. Although I imagine xs4all has more uses than just posting anarchist links, and they lost, so what do I know.
More info about XS4ALL (Score:2, Interesting)
There's some interesting stuff about when they got raided by the CoS (church of scientology) here [df.lth.se].
Excerpt: A corporation like CoS, having its' own security service with a capacity equal to that of a small country, would scare the shit out of any normal firm. XS4ALL, however, is NOT a normal middle-sized firm. It is an ex-foundation, an offshoot of the Dutch hacker-magazine "HackTic". The staff at XS4ALL are ALL cyberpunks, former long-haired anarchists happy to find themselves in charge of a company so fast growing, that it is considered important for the Dutch national economy. And as you can tell from its' name, this is a company which wants to give everyone access to information, worldwide.
Re:Just out of curiosity... (Score:3, Interesting)
but it sucks having to do it over some dangerous wingnuts' propaganda...
As I understand it the the censored article was a descrition of a rather sophisticated form of sabotage. They trigger the railway system's built in fail-safe mechanisms and the trains slow to a few MPH. Minimal damage that actually results in safer than normal operation.
You can disagree with their position. You can arrest them when they sabotage equipment. But you have to respect their commitment to safety.
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