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Censorship Your Rights Online

Yahoo Knuckles Under 232

Posted by jamie from the can-of-worms dept.
ewhac was one of several to inform us that Yahoo has knuckled under. Their auction site will now start using "computer software," which as we all know is infallible, to roboban auctions of Nazi and Klan items (see SFGate's story or CNN's story). France wanted its countrymen kept away from these items, and since Yahoo couldn't block the French, they blocked the stuff. Cigarettes, switchblades and used underwear are also forbidden, but it seems only the hateful stuff gets autoblocked. "Photons have neither morality nor visas" my ass. Just wait until every one of the planet's sovereignties gets a proscripted category of its own -- will I be able to sell paintings by John Wayne Gacy? Wounded Knee medals? Confederate flags? The world's full of offensive knickknacks, Yahoo, have fun banning it all.

The actual terms of service forbid: "any item which, in Yahoo!'s sole discretion, is inflammatory, offensive, unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, or otherwise inconsistent with the spirit of Yahoo! Auctions." It's the robo-enforcement that's new.
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Yahoo Knuckles Under More

Yahoo Knuckles Under

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  • Of course they will. Its easyer than blocking some IP's. Next thing you know we wont be able to go on the net because it's against someones Laws. Hope you didn't expect any better.

  • What are you on???? A. Leet' talk is stupid, B. What the hell did that have to do with today (or this moments) topic??/

    Coward.

  • No one is having their rights violated here. No one has a right to list items on Yahoos auctions and Yahoo is well within their rights to prohibit or allow whatever they want. Quite correctly, Yahoo doesn't want to be seen as profiting from the sales of such items.

    The market will surely react and people will find other outlets for this sort of thing (with or without the French), but good for Yahoo for taking a positive step.

  • I Dont get it (Score:3)

    by TotallyUseless ( 157895 ) <totNO@SPAMmac.com> on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:17AM (#535480) Homepage Journal
    I don't understand why yahoo should have to buckle to this pressure. Why is it up to them to enforce another country's laws? If France wants to deny their citizens access to information and materials, I hardly see how it is yahoo's responsibility to enforce this. If they really want it blocked, they should force isps to block the site as a rule, not force a foriegn company to change the way they do business just because you dont want your citizen's to be able to buy a german ww2 bayonet or something like that. Please give me a break.
  • Personally, if I were Yahoo!, I would have done things a bit differently.

    Rumour around the watering hole was that Yahoo! was being fined $16,000 a day. Well, if that were the case, I would have (resources permitting) cut a check for $17,520,000 and sent it to the French government and said "See us in 3 years."

    Oh well. Clearly not enough chutzpah going around these days.

  • I am still wondering how France can bring action against a company in California, what prevented yahoo from just ignoring France..what would have been the repercussions? Also, can they bring similar action against anyone who sells this stuff on the internet or by telephone?
  • the fact that yahoo was operating in france. to get a french registration (yahoo.fr) you need to have a french office. the yahoo.fr portal offered easy access to nazi items (which has remarkably little to do with offensive or not). yahoo.fr, being a french company, is in french jurisdiction.

    //rdj
  • This is a very slippery slope and I'm not sure it's for the better that we all go down this road... So now that France has set a precedent, which country's next? And what "moral" concept is next? Which website is next to be taken down? If France doesn't like Yahoo's auctions they should just make their ISPs ban those listings instead.
  • I just cant agree with this attitude.
    A. what business do the french, or any other government have telling foreign businesses how to run things?
    B. why is it yahoo's responsibility to enforce the rules of the French government? shouldnt the govt be talking to isps in *their* country about this, rather than a business outside their country?
    C. what happens when the next country in line doesnt like something on yahoo auctions? take it off too, and then the next, and the next...?

    this isnt good for yahoo, and it isnt a good step for a business to take on the internet. Let other countries enforce their own rules with their own money....

  • Yeah, but ... (Score:3)

    by smurfi ( 91140 ) <matthias@urlichs.de> on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:25AM (#535486)
    They want to do business in Germany. German law doesn't like racist stuff at all, and in light of both WWII and the right-wing idiots currently playing Hitler I don't really have a problem with this policy.

    Censorship is bad, don't take me wrong, but free speech is not exactly the most important basic human right out there. It needs to be balanced with others, like for instance the right to life, dammit, and that right isn't furthered by the idiots who stand at the next street corner and shout "kill the f*cking foreigners".

    Sorry, but I'd rather protest restrictions like ebay's blocking of erotica. That stuff at least doesn't promote killing.

  • I think this is a good thing. It was a French law, and French courts have every right to try and make Yahoo comply when people from France access their service.

    To me it seems the only reason Yahoo didn't comply straight away was because it seemed a bit too much like work. It's not like they don't already check where you are accessing their services from already.

    A prime example are some of the "pay-for" services that go along with Yahoo Mail. I access a US server from the UK and get a message saying that for billing reasons I can't use that service. Granted, there will be a bit more coding involved, but it's not likely people from outside the jurisdiction of French law are going to be affected by this decision.

    The whole "don't show Nazi paraphenalia to the people" idea is not a problem with rights "on-line" but rights "in general" and the rights of French people in particular.
  • Simple enough.

    Paying $17.5 million to the French would have effectively told them to piss off.

    It would also up Yahoo!'s visibility as a promoter of Internet freedoms. The controversy would be great for them. Oh well.

  • What's the problem? (Score:4)

    by maddboyy ( 32850 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:26AM (#535489) Homepage
    You know what? I can't go to Toys R Us and buy
    a copy of Debbie Does Dallas. Am I being persecuted because of this? Are my rights being violated? No. Toys R Us, has the right to decide what they sell, not the consumer. Yahoo, Amazon, your ISP, etc. are all businesses, not governments. They don't have to respect your right to buy Nazi propoganda, Confederate flags, etc. They only have to respect the market and occasionally their stock holders. When Yahoo comes knocking on doors and imprisoning people for trying to sell these things, then rights are being violated. Otherwise, just go somewhere else and purchase it. That's your right as a consumer and ultimately, Yahoo will respect those almighty dollars.

  • The Floodgates Are Open. (Score:5)

    by MightyMicro ( 111816 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:28AM (#535490)
    Armed with this, every censor-minded state and politico can now attack the freedom we have taken for granted on the Net. "See, if the French could do it, so can we". A sad, sad, eventuality.

    Yahoo should have pulled out of France rather than submit to this.
  • I have seen this argument used by tons of administrators of boards open to the public. It is absolutely true that it is their property and they can do whatever they want. I don't agree with their choice of actions, however.

    One of the irony's about the constitution of the United States is it gives us the freedom to setup private entities that violate the spirit of the constitution. When I run a public messageboard, I run it as if it were bound by the same constitutional provisions it would be even if it were a federally owned board. I don't censor people and I don't impose my will apon others while administrating the board. I consider that a matter of personal pride as well as a tribute to the things that made this country great in the beginning; things that it seems most Americans aren't even aware of.

    Yahoo isn't doing anyone a service here, they further the cause of the censors here.

    It's bad.

    Bryan McClendon
    Parsons Internet
  • One of the irony's about the constitution of the United States is it gives us the freedom to setup private entities that violate the spirit of the constitution

    Spirit of the constitution? The constitution only applies to the government anyway... What's wrong with Yahoo exercising their rights and freedom?
    I guess you wouldn't mind if 50 anti-whatever protesters assembled on your front lawn since the constitution gives people the right to freely assemble, and you wouldn't want to violate spirit of the constitution by asking them to disperse..

  • Re:Good for Yahoo (Score:4)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:34AM (#535493)
    No one is having their rights violated here. No one has a right to list items on Yahoos auctions and Yahoo is well within their rights to prohibit or allow whatever they want
    Absolutely. However, when the Big Picture is taken into account, it becomes a bad thing. The important word here is 'precedent'. By agreeing to ban Nazi stuff, Yahoo are admitting that any country around the world can decide what a US site can display. Speaking as a denizen of Ireland, would I be within my rights to demand Yahoo remove all artefacts relating to Oliver Cromwell? What about governments that find democracy offensive?
    It's also important, IMO, to point out that Yahoo are not 'taking a positive step'. They are, as the headline points out, knuckling under. They fought this all the way in the French courts, and they lost. What they're doing is complying with French law (which is the right thing to do, probably), but they're not doing this because it's the Right Thing To Do.
    Censorship issues aside, I'm looking forward to what happens when Yahoo's blocking fails (as it inevitably will). Will the be viewed as contempt of court, or will the French tacitly recognise that they're demanding the impossible?

  • what if . . . (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:38AM (#535494)
    . . . there is in some foreign country an auction site that sells cocaine, heroin, LSD and other such stuff to U.S. citizens with guaranteed anonymous delivery? How many milliseconds will this be online before the U.S. government tries to stop this? And if the government of that country refuses to take actions, how long will it be there before the CIA replaces it with a more U.S. friendly government?

  • Re:Yeah, but ... (Score:5)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @12:41AM (#535495) Homepage
    And exactly how is selling or collecting NAZI memorabilia racist?

    These aren't cursed objects that will turn the owner into a goose-stepping NAZI.

  • The important word here is 'precedent'.
    Well, it would be if it were a precedent. Ebay are capable of disallowing display/bidding on illegal items in certain regions(eg, Nazi items in Germany), so how come Yahoo aren't capable of implementing a similar system?
    Bidders presumably must register with their country details, and it can't be hard to implement a filter suppressing the display of specific categories in certain territories. If the French government have banned these items internally, why shouldn't Yahoo be made to adhere to their laws if they want to do business in that region?
  • Why should the constitution only apply to the Government?
    What about the clause which guarantees "freedom of the press"? At least according to the spirit, if not the letter (as technology has changed), does this not apply to entities such as slashdot, yahoo and even private citizens personal webpages? History is not one of my strong subjects, but I believe that at the time constitution was framed, the "press" was not formed of large corporates and conglomerates but mainly small local print shops. So should the individual not have the same rights to publish on the web as (s)he had in days gone by to establishing a printing press?
  • Which, we all know is infalliable. Actually, I just went to the site, and it appears they've improved the code, as it no longer considers 127.0.0.1 to be Norway or something strange.

    ---
  • The point is not what you or I think about Nazi memorabilia; it is about Yahoo doing the right thing and complying with French laws.

    This is no cop-out.

  • how come Yahoo aren't capable of implementing a similar system?

    Yahoo weren't asked to ban the items for people known to have a French address; they were asked to ban them from everyone in France. It's not that subtle a distinction. And AFAIR you don't have to be registered to browse; only to bid. By agreeing to this action, Yahoo have said that they'll block anyone in a certain territory from seeing what that government doesn't want them to see.

    A question: if you had a picture of Falun Gong practitioners on your web site and you got an email from the Chinese government asking you to ensure that it wasn't available to anyone in China, would you ask your ISP to arrange the block?
  • I guess you wouldn't mind if 50 anti-whatever protesters assembled on your front lawn since the constitution gives people the right to freely assemble, and you wouldn't want to violate spirit of the constitution by asking them to disperse..

    Nice try, but the Constitution doesn't give people the right to trespass on private property.

  • Re:I Dont get it (Score:3)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @01:00AM (#535502) Homepage
    I don't understand why yahoo should have to buckle to this pressure. Why is it up to them to enforce another country's laws?

    ...well, for starters, Yahoo is a multinational company, and has a physical business presence [yahoo.com] in France. Businesses in France need to follow French laws; if they don't they get sued and fined. Thus, Yahoo can be fined through their French division if they violate French laws. If they wanted to, they could probably avoid the whole mess by closing up their French operations, but that's a very costly step to take.

  • "No one has a right to list items on Yahoos auctions"

    It really is quite amusing to see just how many people think that censorship applies to anything other than a government repressing individuals. What people do with their own computers is up to them. If the people who run servers want to allow/disallow things being placed on them it is entirely up to them. The people who complain about this sort of thing just have big mouths, but strangely never seem to get around to putting up their own servers.
  • Absolutely.. well put. Everyone is freaking out and saying this is the end of liberty, free speech and apple pie... what chicken-little (Katzian? ;) baloney. This is one company bowing to pressure... and here is the important bit: NOT because they are being forced to, (they could simply withdraw their .fr site... France is only going after the part of Yahoo which is operating within their jurisdiction) but simply because they believe it's better business. There will always be places where nothing is banned, and there will also always be places like Yahoo who administer self censorship for the purposess of establishing a friendly, inoffensive public image and the widest possible target audience.
  • If the constitution only applied to the government, then any U.S. citizen would not have the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. unless they were a part of the government.

    Since this is patently not true, your first statement falls flat.

    As to the 50 anti-whatever protesters on my theoretical lawn: If my lawn were public property, then I would be unable to legally force them to disperse. However, since most "front lawns" are private property of the landowner, then the protesters are trespassing, and therefore may be legally carted away by the cops if they do not honour my request to get off my lawn.

    Furthermore, even if they are on public property, they can be asked to disperse by the authorities if they are causing a public hazard by their assembly. (I.e. if the protesters insist on blocking traffic in front of the state house, they can be busted.)

    Now, as for Yahoo: They are a private business. They can choose not to allow auctions of Nazi paraphenalia. While I do not support the Nazi ideology in any way, shape or form, to the best of my knowledge, the public espousement of the Nazi ideology or public display of any symbology associated with it is only illegal in Germany. As such, I do not support Yahoo's actions, even though I sympathize with their reasoning. In other words, I don't mind that they are no longer allowing auctions of Nazi paraphenalia, but it's still a form of censorship....

    However, since it is business censorship, there's not a whole lot that can be done other then going to another auction site. I doubt Yahoo will lose much money or sleep over their decision.

    Just my 2 shekels.

    Kierthos
  • Yes, but what will happen when Israel takes Ebay or Yahoo to court over allowing their citizens to view auctions of verboten 'pornography'? You don't think your favorite online smut shack won't be the next one dragged to court?? Once the big names fall, the little ones are a cease and desist away. And once the precident has been set, what is to stop them from going after places that do catalog sales, on the logic that some Israli citizen might be able get such an item mailed to them, and from there to brick and morter shops, including the one that used to sell you your copy of 'Debbie does Dallas', on the logic that some Israli citizen in the US might be able to smuggle said 'pornography' through customs himself?
  • It was a French law, and French courts have every right to try and make Yahoo comply when people from France access their service
    Wrong! Get your jusidiction right. The French have every right to limit their citizens to access yahoo.com, but they don't have jusidiction over what yahoo offers outside of France.
  • I'd like to see a breakdown on that...just how "costly" would it be?
  • So if my city passed an ordinance that said that your city has to pay our heating bills you'd "do the right thing"?
  • >A question: if you had a picture of Falun Gong practitioners on your web site and you got an email from the Chinese government asking you to ensure that it wasn't available to anyone in China, would you ask your ISP to arrange the block?

    if I were a company trying to do business in china, I better comply with china law..

    //rdj
  • Does this mean that now we have no more Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo! that suddenly all racial hatred will cease? Somehow I don't think so.

    So, if I sell a flag, that's fine. But if I sell a flag with a swastika on it, then that's not fine. What if the swastika in question is not a Nazi swastika but rather an asian good luck symbol?

    Perhaps governments like the French should spend a bit more time educating their own population to tolerate their fellow humans, so that Nazi items are just historical curiosities, rather than tools of mass destruction.

    I think people are spending too much time finding a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. It's like saying a knife is only harmful if it has an SS logo on it.
  • Yahoo is well within their rights to prohibit or allow whatever they want
    Well apparently not...thats the point. Yahoo can't auction legal goods. That is the point.
  • "if I were a company trying to do business in china, I better comply with china law.. "

    Is it really just a form of blackmail? I hadn't considered that...If I want to do business in china, i'd better apply china's laws to the rest of the world...hmmm...
  • It's not the French government, it's a jewish student association suing. They're sue-happy. They sue anyone, anytime, for any reason. They just happen to have found a judge to listen to them.

    --

  • yup.. it's blackmail.. btw.. didn't the US have a policy forbidding companies in the US (not US companies necessarily) to do business with cuba? seems just as bad.

    //rdj

  • It would also up Yahoo!'s visibility as a promoter of Internet freedoms. The controversy would be great for them. Oh well.

    It's one thing to defend freedom of speech; but defending such freedom through that of nazi sympathizers (because that's how people see this auction thing) is not going to be the most popular way.

    I strongly disagree with the lawsuit and court decision, that being said this is NOT a great cause.

    Just like, even though I strongly oppose the death penalty, I would'nt use the case of a confessed serial killer or child molester to attack it -- there's plenty of causes that deserve it better (Mumia Abuh Jahmal)


    --

  • Yahoo Auctions 2005 (Score:5)

    by crucini ( 98210 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @01:49AM (#535517)
    By clicking 'I Accept' below, you affirm under penalty of perjury that the item:
    • Was not owned, issued, manufactured, specified by any Nazi, Soviet Communist or other official of a repressive state, and does not bear the likeness, symbol or insignia of any political organization or entity other than a free western democracy.
    • Cannot be used to harm a human being, household pet, personal property or the environment, or to violate anyone's privacy, or to duplicate without authorization information that is protected by copyright or patent or by your country's National Security laws or regulations, nor to tamper with any electronic or computer system.
    • Does not cause offence to, or ridicule or belittle, people of any religion, political belief, sexual preference, race, profession, place of abode, preference in operating systems or applications, physical, mental or emotional handicap, characteristic odor, drug or smoking habit, criminal record, personality or character.
    • Does not embody the proprietary intellectual property of any government, corporation, religion, or any other organization, except that it may be or include a properly licensed copy of such a work, complete with a notarized receipt.
    • Cannot be used to facilitate any abnormal sexual practices, and does not bear any obvious bodily secretions or residues of intoxicating drugs.

    Thank you for using Yahoo! auctions.
    I Accept [hoboes.com]
  • Read what you quoted, missy! You told me I was wrong then agreed with what I said. Perhaps if I refrase you might see what I mean.

    Yahoo were offering a service to the whole world - which includes France. The French court found that this service *sometimes* contravened French law when French citizens accessed it *in France* The French court ruled that Yahoo should filter the service such that when people *in France* used it, the service did not contravene French law.

    Are jurisdictional issues sorted now?

  • What I don't understand it, why didn't Yahoo just eliminate their French branch and pull up stakes?

    What a bunch of silly fucks out there.

    There's 60 million consumers in France ... Now how many nazi memorabilia aficionados are they gonna piss off with this decision? A couple hundreds. So you want them to ditch a couple dozen million dollars (if not more) investment just to please a few right wing nuts?

    Anyway. I don't agree with the stupid lawsuit, I don't agree with the court decision, I thikn the guys who sued them are idiots, however I believe that Yahoo is right to remove Nazi stuff from their site ... because it stinks.


    --

  • - Cannot be used to facilitate any abnormal sexual practices

    Shit, I must run fast now...
  • Au contrair. According to a previous /. article at http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/20/1657238.shtm l [slashdot.org], France was also going after yahoo's .com and other TLD auctions because French people might possibly gain access to them. Wouldn't it be a more intelligent idea to, you know, complain to the french citezens who can't obey their own laws, rather than getting on an outside business' case about it. This is like the US government, during prohibition times, complaining to the canadian government for allowing its citezenry to make the booze that US citezens might possibly try bootlegging.

  • Did you read my entire post?

    I did. But you miss the point. It's not just about a fucking URL, dude. There's more than DOTCOM out there.

    It doesn't sound like it.
    I said:
    "Re-host their French-language site as fr.yahoo.com or yahoo.fr.com or something like that with the servers in the US, leaving no legal entity within French jurisdiction."

    And they're going to do business with French advertisers, how exactly? They're going to send their sales persons ... how exactly? Yahoo earns money on advertising mostly in case you didn't know.

    All those 60 million consumers can still get to Yahoo's site just fine. All that changes is the URL. Yahoo still owns its servers and whatever other equipment it can transport out of France. What percent of their couple dozen million dollar investment would they have to forfeit?

    Their offices, their staff, their equipment, etc ... There's more to doing business on the web than just a website. I case you did'nt know ...


    --

  • Censorship is bad, don't take me wrong, but free speech is not exactly the most important basic human right out there.

    Wrong. It is both the most important and most basic human right. Once you grant it, all others follow. Once it has been denied, no others can stand.

    It needs to be balanced with others, like for instance the right to life, dammit, and that right isn't furthered by the idiots who stand at the next street corner and shout "kill the f*cking foreigners"

    No one lives forever. Only our ideas, expressed in well-chosen words, can.

    Freedom of speech is what allows you to point to that idiot on the streetcorner as the next Little Corporal. We've already seen what happens when you drive him underground instead of exposing him. The answer to 'bad' speech is more speech, not censorship.

  • Real Historical Medals vs. Skinhead Junk (Score:3)

    by wheelgun ( 178700 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @03:34AM (#535538)

    What ticks me off is their failure to distinguish between modern racial movement trinkets and the highly refined hobby of medal collecting.

    The man who first introduced me to WW2 artifacts was a Jew whose father served in the US Army during WW2. His father brought home tons of German surplus items and thus my friend eventually became a dedicated collector. At one point he owned one of Hermann Goering's dress uniforms. Serious collecting requires brains and YEARS of experience! It's not exactly the kind of hobby a nuckle-dragging skinhead enjoys.

    Hell, Pokemon collectors are more violent than Nazi medal collectors!
  • Ah yes, but what you misunderstand is that with Toys 'R' Us that's an American country deciding it. I can't help but think there wouldn't be so much outcry if an American court had objected to the sale of particular items...

    And to be fair, I can't see how anyone in America can imagine they have any right to lecture the French on how to deal with (neo-)Nazis, since their experience 50 years ago was ENTIRELY different...
  • "However, when the Big Picture is taken into account, it becomes a bad thing. The important word here is 'precedent'. By agreeing to ban Nazi stuff, Yahoo are admitting that any country around the world can decide what a US site can display."

    According to the BBC News report [bbc.co.uk] of the story Yahoo has banned the sale of Nazi items in accordance of their own TOC and not because of the French descision. Even though they have chosen to ban these items they are continuing with their appeal in the US courts over the jurisdiction of the French courts.

    They have also banned auctions for any other hate group propaganda including the KKK.

    Yahoo's lawyer said "The company shared a general concern about hate speech. But the company also is concerned about freedom of speech, which is why we will continue to fight the French court's order,"
  • Speaking as a denizen of Ireland, would I be within my rights to demand Yahoo remove all artefacts relating to Oliver Cromwell?

    This is the key point in all this. At what point and under whose guidance does an artifact become an "offensive political symbol"?

    Obviously many people view artifacts from Nazi Germany as items of serious historical merit, and not just the curators of Holocaust museums. What about stuff from Russia? Communist China? Napoleonic France? What's the litmus test for offensive?

    It's not clear to me what political agenda is being advanced here, but I'm suspicious of the desire to block only Nazi memorabilia.

  • I'm indifferent. (Score:5)

    by alsta ( 9424 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @04:04AM (#535545)
    I don't really care what Yahoo! decides to do in terms of blocking certain ads for inanimate objects. The reason for this is that I wouldn't use Yahoo! at all in the first place. Especially if I was to buy German WWII militaria.

    I have a collection of German WWII militaria, among others a full uniform and a bunch of medals. These used to belong to my late Great Grandfather. He was an officer in the SS Legion Latvia on the eastern front. He got wounded at Kursk but still managed to save two of his men. He died shortly after. His wife was awarded the Ritter Kreuz, which is also in my collection. Know what? Not all Germans killed Jews. Neither did they all like Hitler. In fact, most Germans hated him.

    But this collection I have, however offensive it may be to French or other people, is part of my heritage. I will pass this on to my decendants when that time comes. My Great Grandfather fought a battle, in which he died as well as many of his countrymen. Now here is for the real noodle. He wasn't German. He was Latvian. He fought for the Germans because that was the only opposition towards the Soviets who blatantly occupied his country. So there is history on both sides of the war. Stalin, who was the almighty ally of the Allies, was one of the most horrible people in the 20th century. Genocide in the form of "artificial starvations" and the like were only part of the horror that he induced. He didn't care wheather somebody was close to him or not. He killed them anyway. But we all seem to forget these things.

    Why not ban American militaria from that era? I think I know why, the winner writes the book. But a great man known as General Patton was not a very nice guy either. Upon the surrender of approximately 300 German soldiers near Ville Spockers, France, he ordered his men to shoot the Germans who already had given up. Why? Because he didn't think that Germans were good enough to be taken prisoners. But then again, history is only as good as in the eye of the beholder. I think that WWII militaria should be widely traded and at the best possible way be taken care of. American, German, British, Soviet, Japanese and Italian... These tokens of history may aid in preventing future uprisings of left-/rightwing extremists. We should all remember the people that died in that war. We should learn from the atrocities of the 20th century. Not the way we punished the Germans after WWI. These "bannings" of certain objects only fuel the growth of underground organizations who will obtain these artifacts for tokenizing some kind of religion. It is unfortunate that the people out there that really do collect WWII militaria should suffer for these reasons. Once again, these people are probably more interested in the history than starting a foundation of a Vierte Reich.

    However, as I started out, if I was in the market for obtaining some German militaria, I would look at http://www.german-militaria.co.uk, rather than Yahoo! auctions.

    Thanks for reading and understanding that I in no way support what the holocaust or whatever other atrocities the Germans bestowed upon others, by posting this response.

    Alex

  • Since when is it only possible to transact with someone if they have an office in your country? I've done business with companies in Japan, Australia, Canada, and the UK, all of those companies being regular stores with online presences, and way too small to have offices in the US. Yet I was able to deal with them just fine.

    Well you still miss the point. For 2 reasons that I will have to spell out since you don't seem to get it:

    1. Yahoo, INC. has set up a subsidiary in France. They have likely spent a few dozen million dollars to do this. If they've done it they certainly have a good reason. Which is ...

    2. Doing a transaction with someone is not the same as doing business. Yes, I have bought stuff from Amazon.com, it's not the same as generating millions of income from the USA.

    Yahoo is a service company. They sell, mostly, advertising. To sell advertising you need ... sales person. You need people to call, handle calls, visit customers, do accounting, that kind of things. Even if you move as much as you can outside the country ... you still NEED an office there, because you can't really do THAT KIND of business from abroad.

    Funny, my company was able to send sales people to sell software to folks in France (and various companies in Europe) long before we were big enough to afford offices there.

    Send them from Belgium, or Luxembourg, or Germany, or wherever.

    Send them from Germany to avoid anti hate speech laws ... now that's a sound advice. Duh. And I believe Belgium and Luxembourg to have the same kind of laws.

    Look, you don't make sense. Yes, you *can* sell stuff from abroad. You can. Is it the best? Certainly, undoubtedly NOT. Specifically in the kind of business Yahoo is in.


    --

  • A victory for French Revisionism (Score:3)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @04:15AM (#535548)
    Hooray, it's a victory for French revisionism! The French would really rather have us all forget their own little foray into Nazi collaboration since it makes it that much easier for them to try to gain whatever advantage they can over the Germans.

    And don't forget, you new champions of French political enlightenment, that it was your friends in the French government that saw fit to bomb the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" in a New Zealand harbor.

    But then again this is really nothing new from the people that brought you the Comittee of Public Safety, Robespierre and Saint-Just.

    The thing I find really ironic about all this that they don't seem concerned at all with people collecting "memorabilia" related to Louis XVI or Napoleon -- c'mon, didn't the French at least have a revolution to overthrow that bad Bourbon king? Or are we still embarassed enough over the Terrors to not want to make a stink over it? Kind of like the embarassment over the Vichy government.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Or maybe a nice painting made from the blood of aborted fetuses.

    I sure want one of those. Make a nice addition to my coffee table. And if you're offended by this, just keep driving.

    Countries are allowed to make local laws. Don't like it - then too bad. It is against the law for example to display a swastika in Germany. That's their law. Don't give me a long boring lecture on the origin of the swastika, don't tell me about the treatment of Native Americans, don't draw me a stupid analogy to something else. It's not relevant.
  • The swastika was also a military emblem for Finland and Latvia. The Finns used the swastika until the end of WWII, using a light blue on on a blue background for aircraft identification.

    A couple of years ago I saw a model kit of Japanese origin of a Hawker Hurricane in Finnish markings. On the box art all swastikas had been airbrushed out. The decal set did, however, contain the correct decals.

  • Are you racist? (Score:5)

    by PhilHibbs ( 4537 ) <snarks@gmail.com> on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @05:01AM (#535560) Journal
    If it is legal to be a racist neo-nazi in the US, I don't see why we should tolerate this in Europe.
    I disagree entirely with your conclusion. I know how dangerous racism is. I know, because I am a racist. So are you. So is everyone I know. We all have prejudices, and the sooner we realise it, the better. Brushing it under the carpet will only make the next generation unaware of the dangers. 99% of people associate antisemitism with Nazi Germany. They are simply unaware that the Nazis were only the latest in a long and inglorious European tradition [uea.ac.uk] of blaming the Jews for economic problems, and massacring them for it. We've been doing it for over a thousand years. I have no reason to presume that I am inherently morally superior to my forefathers, or any less likely to do the same, except that I know of the dangers inherent in laying blame on a social or ethnic group. I know what happens when it goes too far. I know, because we have historical record of it. If you make that historical record taboo, then it will disappear, and we will make the same mistakes over again. Sorry, this rant isn't directed against you, Juju, or anyone in particular, I just happened to pick on your post to reply to. I was going to write something about Saddam Hussein taking ebay to court for selling whiskey [ebay.co.uk], but I kinda switched tracks.
  • It's not relevant here. Of course it is relevant otherwise and those are very importantlessons to learn but not here as to the precise application of some other country's laws. What I meant to say is that it is not relevant to have a long discourse on why some person thinks that the application of this law is unfair. As in a pseudo factual lecture about how the swastika come from India and it's not really a Nazi symbol...blah blah blah.

    My point was that there are many things that are offensive. Some of them you will agree with some you will not. What I don't want is a justification of why what you want is ok but what I want is not. Thems the laws. In France and Germany there is ample justification for doing away with these symbols regardless of how Americans think about it. Likewise one of the most popular symbols of hate in Germany today is the Confederate flag. So while it is perfectly ok to block its display at the S. Carolina statehouse it's probably not ok to complain that those items are on sale in Munich.

  • Re:Spank you very much, Jamie (Score:4)

    by jamiemccarthy ( 4847 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @05:13AM (#535565) Homepage Journal
    As the little blurb I wrote makes abundantly clear for any of you who would actually care to read it, the issue is not whether this individual decision is "censorship" or not. You can split hairs over that word's meaning all day, have fun, I put it in that topic category because I didn't have one for "American corporation kowtows to foreign nation's irrelevant laws."

    So can we please shut up about whether Yahoo has the right to write its own terms of service however it wants? It does. Thank you. Next.

    The point is that corporations will kowtow to foreign anti-speech laws. This is a high-profile example. Hell, I don't care that I won't be able to buy a Nazi pin from Yahoo; if I really wanted one (I don't) I'd just go to eBay. Until eBay does the same. And then all the other auction sites. And then they refuse to sell John Wayne Gacy paintings. And Civil War memorabilia from the Confederate side because it promotes slavery.

    And then it's not just auctions, it's email sent to and from your free Yahoo account. And then web traffic sent over AboveNet's backbone [slashdot.org].

    What I was hoping was that people like you would think about what this could mean. Instead of getting up on your high horse and announcing that this decision is meaningless and that I'm a loon for thinking it's noteworthy, please just use your head for a minute.

    Will photons need visas? I'm afraid too many people have been trained to recite comforting mantras like that whenever they see something that looks like censorship. The internet knows no national borders, cyberspace considers national laws to be local ordinances, etc.

    But in ten years, your photons damn well may need visas because every corporation that delivers you any service you care about finds it easier to censor you because they want to continue doing business with Outer Schizovania, and Outer Schizovania demands that its national pride not be injured by hateful references to the War of 1827.

    Possibly the greatest threat to free expression on the internet, over the next ten years, is the complacent attitude of those who think free expression is guaranteed.

    Jamie McCarthy

  • What I don't understand it, why didn't Yahoo just eliminate their French branch and pull up stakes?
    There's 60 million consumers in France ... Now how many nazi memorabilia aficionados are they gonna piss off with this decision? A couple hundreds.

    Once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane. Refusal to yield to extortion is not only righter -- in the long run, it's cheaper.
    /.

  • The permitting process is actually a way to notify the local government that the demonstration is going to take place, so they can arrange for any out-of-the-ordinary requirements of the demonstration (police protection, street closings, etc). It's when the permitting process starts to allow or disallow protests based on the topic that it strays into being anti-constitutional.


    ...phil

  • Send them from Germany to avoid France's censorship laws.

    Ah shut up. You can only call this 'censorship' by a very, very big stretch. Well I'll tell you what: it's much MUCH worse in Germany.

    Whether Germany would try to do as France has done, is another question.

    It's not 'France' that has done this. It's a bunch of losers who have sued, and managed to convince a judge that a certain law applied. This law, btw, it not about censorship. It forbids publicizing the sale of nazi stuff. You're still allowed to sell it, you just can't publicize it. Well they convinced the judge that putting that on a website is publicity.

    See above. It's not a matter of whether those countries have those laws, it's whether they'd enforce French laws, or whether they'd try to push their own laws onto a site hosted outside their country, as France has.

    Err. They have the same kind of law, the hypothetical website who would move its operations there would face the same kind of problem. Plus under the European Union, they might not be very much covered anyway.

    Again, I'll agree that there are limitations and that volume of business is an issue, but why would "the kind of business Yahoo is in" be particularly unsuited? I would expect that selling something intangible like advertising would be less hindered by not having an office in the country in question.

    Hmm. It's quite simple. If you have someone willing to buy advertising, you can really do that from anywhere. That's beyond obvious.

    The problem is not about sending invoices ... The problem is getting the people to agree to buy such advertising in the first place. For that you need a sales force. And no, you can't do that with just the web and a phone. Or poorly so.

    What are they going to do when every country starts following France's example and insisting that the things they don't like have to be removed from Yahoo?

    I agree with that. Again, I think the court decision was stupid, and that the lawsuit was stupid. And useless. And dangerous. It is dangerous. Granted. No discussion, it's obvious.

    Now Yahoo would lose a lot by not complying in this case, and gain very, very little. Which is the point of this thread, here.


    --

  • Re:What's the problem? (Score:3)

    by ethereal ( 13958 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @05:22AM (#535570) Journal
    And to be fair, I can't see how anyone in America can imagine they have any right to lecture the French on how to deal with (neo-)Nazis, since their experience 50 years ago was ENTIRELY different...

    Well, let's check the score:

    • France - conquered and/or capitulated to Nazis (depending on whose history you believe, but Vichy has to count for something), citizens killed by Nazis, now has draconian regulations of all things Nazi (and we all know how making things forbidden drives the young people away).
    • The U.S. - never conquered by Nazis, citizens killed by Nazis, currently has no regulations on Nazis freedom of speech (thus ensuring that everybody knows what a neo-Nazi really is, so that they get laughed out of every town they're in).

    Sure, the final verdict on resisting Nazism isn't in yet, but I bet 50 more years of the same approaches will leave neo-Nazis in the U.S. a forgotten bunch of reactionaries (like all those nuts who think The South Will Rise Again) and neo-Nazis in France an underground known-subversive group that's essentially a new kind of gang for all the young hoodlums to join. I know where I'd rather live...

    P.S. The correct moderation for this is ~maybe off-topic. Definitely not flamebait, though.

  • I don't see any articles on /. complaining about how Wal-Mart is denying me my "rights" because they are choosing not to carry the abortion pill.
  • Wrong. It is both the most important and most basic human right. Once you grant it, all others follow. Once it has been denied, no others can stand.

    Do you actually have a logical argument supporting this claim?

  • Re:exactly (Score:5)

    by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @05:43AM (#535583)
    What if tomorrow, Iran sued Wal-Mart demanding they take all copies of the Swimsuit Issue of SI, Kathy Ireland calendars, etc... off the shelf?

    What if tomorrow, Chnia sued demanding that Best Buy, CompUSA, etc... stop selling Linux?

    This decision would be fine if Yahoo had stood up on their own and said "Hey...we don't like this hateful crap - we won't let you sell it."

    However, it is not their decision. It is the french government standing up and saying "Hey...we don't like this hateful crap - it reminds us of how we rolled over - you can't let people sell it."

    About the only differnce is that Yahoo has a "branch" in France, whereas Wal-Mart may not have one in Iran, or Best Buy in China - but with the Internet, does that matter anymore?

    Lowest Common Denominator.
  • ...like all those nuts who think The South Will Rise Again...

    But we have. Carter: Southern. Bush I: Southern. Clinton: Southern. Gore: Southern. Bush II: Southern. The Southern economy, after a century of disaster due to the actions of Yankees, finally started to take off some decades ago. We're booming.

  • It is both the most important and most basic human right. Once you grant it, all others follow. Once it has been denied, no others can stand

    Well, not quite. The most fundamental right is to right to bear arms, which allows one to turn words into actions. One can let people say what they wish--if they can do nothing about it, it doesn't matter.

  • Actually, the people whose rights are being violated are the owners of Yahoo, who are being denied the right to conduct honest business.
    /.
  • This wasn't as much about France's ruling as it was about the bad press Yahoo! was getting. It wasn't just the French, but also a group called BiasHELP that was somehow dealing with Yahoo as well. I doubt any company would want to be given a bad reputation and they are just going to try to prevent this. Whether or not they actually do anything about these auctions remains to be seen. This decision by Yahoo! was also made by ebay and a few other auction sites long ago, so they are just following suit. Also, it was stated in the cnet article that Yahoo! is planning to use *people* and software. They know better than to just rely on some sort of censorware product.

    Also, Yahoo! auctions is going to start forcing people to pay for their listings. Not much, I think it was anywhere from $0.20 to $2.25, but still that is a long way from free for such shoddy auctions as they have on Yahoo. Their listings are a disaster and are not nearly as organized as ebay, and they have a lot less bids as well. There's really no good reason to use Yahoo! auctions anymore, and I would say that the refusal to carry items dealing with hatred and violence are one of the smaller reasons. They just suck all around.

  • Personally, if I were Yahoo!, I would have done things a bit differently.

    My own choice would be to set up the system so that any attempt to access Nazi memorabilia from France returns a link relating to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.

    Such malicious compliance would surgically strike the nerve (embarassment over Vichy collaboration) protected by the national More Anti-Nazi Than Thou veneer.
    /.

  • Isn't that what capitalism is all about? How about self-moderation? Isn't the idea that "if you don't like how it's done, do it yourself" a good one? Why not argue that "Linus won't accept my patches, and neither will Alan! What next, the folks who wrote 'ls' won't accept my patches?"
  • "Before spouting off about things of which you know nothing, do some research."

    Please do. I'd like to respond to you personally to offer some good research sources, but you posted anonymously so I can't.

    One good source that debunks 66 common Holocaust-denier fantasies is the "66 QAR [nizkor.org]" (questions, answers, replies). It happens to be written by two friends and myself and it's a little old (1996, I think) but it's still very much on-target. Most of the lies you'll hear about the Holocaust are addressed in here.

    For information specifically about Auschwitz, I recommend The Holocaust History Project's website, at http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/ [holocaust-history.org]. Disclaimer: I happen to be the site's webmaster. Please note that we include reproductions of several documents which deal specifically with the annihilation of the Jews at that death camp.

    You may want to read and listen to Hitler's own intentions for the Jews [holocaust-history.org], which he and Goebbels made the climax of a 1940 propaganda film so you know it wasn't just something he said off the cuff.

    And you'll also want to listen to Heinrich Himmler's description of the final solution [nizkor.org], given in a private talk to SS leaders in 1943. Himmler, Hitler's #2 man, describes how the Nazi intentions are being carried out. Luckily for historians, Himmler recorded his speeches, and this tape was one of the few that survived:

    "I want to also mention a very difficult subject before you, with complete candor. It should be discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. ... I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. 'The Jewish people is being exterminated,' every Party member will tell you, 'perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.' ... We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us."

    If you're interested in the antisemitic movement to deny the Holocaust, which calls itself Holocaust "revisionism," the best source to start with is Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust [isbn.nu]. It discusses the origins of such groups as the Institute for Historical Review, which you name; really they're just fancy, pseudoscientific wrappers around the same racism and hate that the world has known since, well, since human beings existed I suppose.

    If you have any questions about specific matters, please feel free to email me personally.

    Jamie McCarthy

  • French law has jurisdiction only over things IN FRANCE. Yahoo US and the .com site are NOT IN FRANCE, so French law does not have jurisdiction over them.

    Maybe French courts have decided to copy US courts and ignore that their jurisdiction ceases at the border...
  • If the constitution only applied to the government, then any U.S. citizen would not have the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. unless they were a part of the government.

    Except that the US constitution is more about limiting the power of (federal) government than giving rights to it's citizens.
  • Well fucking said. You should have been scored a 4 on this one for insight. It makes me nervous to hear it implied that the US is somehow screwed up because it "allows racism". Bad ideas are an unfortunate side-effect of freedom of expression. If you outlaw bad thinking, you outlaw FREE thinking.
  • To the best of my knowledge, Wal-Mart doesn't sell that issue in Iran. If they did, and Iranian courts ordered them to stop, I'm sure they would stop. Similarly for China and Linux (though I doubt that would happen, since the Chinese seem to like Linux).

    Here's another perspective: suppose someone was selling kiddie porn through Yahoo!, Yahoo! knew about it, and decided to let the sale continue. Someone could say, "But that's legal in , and Yahoo! can reach ." Yahoo! is an international company by default, so it has the burden of respecting the laws of the nations in which it does business.

    I think the comment about whose decision it was is a bit strange. Are the only alternatives complete capitulation to the French (must...resist...urge...to make...joke) and complete altruism? Yahoo! is a business that wants to make money. Getting French eyeballs makes them money, probably moreso than selling Nazi propoganda. It also helps their public image. I don't know how well their filtering works, and whether they'll have humans to look at borderline cases, but I think they're at least trying to do the right thing.

  • Well, it's somewhat obvious that Yahoo was influenced by the French government... before, Yahoo didn't enforce their TOS, now they do.

    The precedent is a social one... that countries are allowed to pressure offshore companies to take on their values. In effect, that it's socially acceptable for the more conservative (and politically influential) countries to partially limit access for citizens all over the world.

    But perhaps that's a desired effect of globalization, I don't know... Political influence is not always a bad thing (eg. one person, one vote).

    As far as an international governing body goes... if a law were to be made that said "no Nazi stuff ever", then that would obviously be in conflict with some countries basic tenets. Nor could the governing body demand that access be restricted for France only-- that's technically impossible. So all that is left is political/social pressure, which is current situation. (Not that there aren't plausible arguments for an international governing body, I just don't see how it would help here)
    --

  • Yes, they have offices in France, they run the French version of Yahoo there, which has no Nazi auctions. Why should the American/International site have to comply with French laws?

    Look at it this way. Why should Yahoo, who is legally bound to follow the laws of France as a corporation because they have a physical presence in the country, be able to circumvent the letter and intent of French law simply by auctioning Nazi memorabilia off on a site that isn't "intended" for French audiences?

    The tricky thing is, if you are a multinational web company and you have a physical presence in a country, then for all intents and purposes, you are responsible for making sure that all of your content meets that nation's legal standards.

    Yahoo has voluntarily set up shop in France. As such, it is Yahoo's responsibility to abide by French law, not France's responsibility. It does not matter what URL people use to get to yahoo's content, or where the servers reside; what matters is that Yahoo The Multinational Corporation is responsible for piping illegal webpages to France. France can charge them with whatever they see fit and can fine them however they deem necessary so long as Yahoo does business in France.

  • I'm sorry, but I find it kind of hard to up the level of discussion when it contains the underlying assumptions that you started off with. It includes the assumption that free speech as an absolute should be bought into wholesale or you will be branded a tyrant, instead of treating free speech as one of the forces balancing how to legally codify what is acceptable interaction - as even the United States does and always has. It includes the assumption that buying and selling Nazi memorabilia is a neutral activity or should be treated as such without moral or ethical dimensions or even a hint of a question about that. It includes the assumption that a trans-global network need not have respect for the laws created by democratically chosen legislators, that a country has no right to sovereignity in the face of the Internet. It includes the assumption that, somehow, questioning and examining this trafficking in objects of hate is by another country is morally akin to setting fire to the first ammendment, that a country that has democratically decided it does not want people to make a buck out of objects connected to utmost horror is something to automatically condemn.

    Added to that is having to repeatedly confront in these discusions the notion that banning this form of 'speech' is a French ploy to wipe out the memories of the Third Reich, a notion so ludicrously ignorant of how European countries and cultures discuss and deal with the Occupation that as a European I find it acutely painful to watch.

    I'm sorry, but with this kind of groundwork the deck is just stacked against having any kind of inquisitive or meaningful dialog. It started out as a flat form of anti-censorship chest-thumping without hinting at a shred of insight about the many dimensions of what was being thumped about. It all reads like the central thesis is about being majorly pissed off that those damn furriners are doing away with the notion of Free Speech because somehow, somewhere, somebody was not allowed to make that almighty dollar that is hir God-given damned birthright.

    You want more, start by giving more. In the meantime, in face of this start, I bow out.

    FJ!!

  • If a man from France comes over to my store in the United States and buys a Nazi flag, French law does not apply. If he takes that flag back to France, then he most certainly has a problem. It is not my problem, and I cannot be compelled to not sell to him.

    Now extend this to the web. The man is in France and visits my web site in the United States. Why is this really any different?

    Now switch to the auction model, where I don't even do the selling, but just provide a medium for the buyer and selling to come to terms. French law and French attitudes simply do not apply to me, here in the United States.

    There is nothing good in this at all. The French can have their law. If the French people like it, they can have it. If not, well they know how to make a little revolution. But letting France extend their law into the United States, and using it to affect me and my commerce, is absolutely wrong.

    As for Yahoo, I know they just buckled under, despite what they claimed, which is BS anyway, because artifacts themselves only identify things. Saying the word "Nazi" is no different than showing the Nazi flag (at least for most of us that do know this symbol represents evil). Owning such a flag does not mean I am evil, but rather, would mean that I am saying "Nazi" in some context. For some that might mean that they are saying it to represent who they are. But I believe for most people, it is saying that something evil can, and probably still does, exist in the world, and we have to be on guard for it, probably forever.

    The French attitude is all wrong. They are just trying to hide it. It's no different than outlawing the word "Nazi" or the world "evil" (however it is said in their language, which I'm not going to go look up right now). I'm not going to go over to France and tell them they have to change. But I will now encourage people in the United States to boycott, or even ban, anything and everything from France. As far as I'm concerned, France itself is heading down the same deep spiral that Germany did in the 1920's and 1930's. I may well have to label France with a Nazi flag, soon.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Well, it's a bit semantic, but... there IS a difference between... being aware that your ideas about a specific group are guesses at best... and on the other hand, taking your beliefs to be obviously true and acting on them in life-threatening or permanently-economically-damaging ways.

    Sure, it's somewhat easy to slide into being discriminatory and one should guard against that, but I wouldn't say that everyone handles their perceptions in an equally poor or evil way.

    I would also suggest that prejudice occurs naturally because we have imperfect knowledge. And that as the learning process continues, old prejudices disappear and new ones come into being. So it would be my opinion that if you are aware that humans often unfairly stigmatize outgroups and you try to guard against that, then you're somewhat morally superior to those who don't.
    --

  • Yes. I agree. Too bad I didn't have any mod points or I would have used them. The parent article does need modded up to the top "insightful".

    Too bad I think Yahoo's auction site sucks, because that deprives me of the opportunity to boycott them, which I now will do for all the rest of Yahoo. It's legal for them to make the decision they did, but it's also legal for me to not play along.

  • What if tomorrow, Iran sued Wal-Mart demanding they take all copies of the Swimsuit Issue of SI, Kathy Ireland calendars, etc... off the shelf?

    Then Wal-Mart would likely remove its physical presence from Iran (if it has one) and ignore the ruling.

    What if tomorrow, Chnia sued demanding that Best Buy, CompUSA, etc... stop selling Linux?

    Then Best Buy, CompUSA, etc... would likely remove their physical presence from China (if they have one) and ignore the ruling.

    This decision would be fine if Yahoo had stood up on their own and said "Hey...we don't like this hateful crap - we won't let you sell it." However, it is not their decision.

    You're damn right it isn't Yahoo's decision. It is the French government enforcing their own laws on companies operating on their own soil. Tell me why Yahoo should be exempt from complying with the laws of a nation where they voluntarily and legally exist as a business entity?

    It is the french government standing up and saying "Hey...we don't like this hateful crap - it reminds us of how we rolled over - you can't let people sell it."

    I assure you that there is no lack of rememberance of what happened when the Nazis controlled France here. There do not exist in America memorial walls that list the names and dates of French citizens executed by the Nazis at that particular location. The one I see most often sits beside a freeway overpass near a client office, and usually has fresh flowers at it. You do not live in a building that once housed Nazis. You do not walk down streets that once rumbled with Panther tanks. You do not have a Holocaust depoortation memorial at the heart of your city. You do not take courses from a professor who very clearly remembers the whole invasion and occupation. You have ABSOLUTELY NO CONCEPT of the memory that lives here of Nazi Germany and Occupied France.

    About the only differnce is that Yahoo has a "branch" in France, whereas Wal-Mart may not have one in Iran, or Best Buy in China - but with the Internet, does that matter anymore?

    With the Internet, the sovereignty of a nation is more important than ever. It is crass, foolish and dangerously condescending to expect the rest of the world to fall in line with what is essentially the American ideology of How The Web Should Be.

    Lowest Common Denominator.

    Duly noted.

  • You know what? I can't go to Toys R Us and buy a copy of Debbie Does Dallas. Am I being persecuted because of this? Are my rights being violated? No.

    Your rights aren't being violated, but Toys R Us's rights may be getting violated, if the reason they don't sell the movie is that the force of law prevents them. Likewise, in this case, it is not the auction sellers and buyers who are being repressed, it is Yahoo itself.

    It can be argued that whenever anyone's rights are violated, it hurts everyone since it undermines the presumption that those rights exist.


    ---

  • Must... resist... Godwin's... Law... (Score:5)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @08:34AM (#535643)
    Seriously, it's tempting. These hypocritical bookburners are no better than the people they claim to be fighting against, if these are the tactics they want to use.

    The problem here isn't that Yahoo isn't selling this stuff anymore. The problem is that they were forced to stop selling it by a third party which ought to have no jurisdiction anyway, solely because of this group's own ideals. The precedent is dangerous.

    Or, to put it another way, I have the right to speak or not speak as I please. I do not have the right to silence another for no better reason than my own paranoia, however. But this is what happened here.
    ----------

  • What The French Actually Did (Score:5)

    by streetlawyer ( 169828 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2001 @08:44AM (#535648) Homepage
    Ok, there is a vast amount of wrong comment going round on this subject, so here is an actual explanation of what happened.

    First, Yahoo are offering a service into France, so they are *bound to observe French law*, *so far as it is possible*. Two important clauses there. In the first place, the fact that Yahoo is an American company is irrelevant. They are offering a service into France, so their physical location matters for liability purposes no more than Exxon's company head office in Delaware matters when one of their tankers spills oil all over SouthEast Asia or something. The test for whether they are "offering a service into" France is a complicated one (it's most usually relevant for tax purposes), but it's a fairly settled body of law. If Yahoo were merely offering a service that French citizens happened to be able to pick up, things might be different, but the existence of yahoo.fr means that this particular train left some time ago.

    Right, that's cleared up. Now, secondly, it's an important principle that the law does not compel anyone to do the impossible. If there were genuinely nothing that Yahoo could do, a French court would never fine them. It would end up simply ruling that they could not offer the service in France (reread what is meant by "offering a service" above). In fact, the judgement sets out a number of things that Yahoo could have done but refused to do.

    The facts of the case are interesting in themselves. Yahoo removed the Nazi auctions from yahoo.fr, but placed a link reading "If you want to research more about this subject, please visit yahoo.com". This seems a bit blatant to me; they were attempting to comply with the letter rather than the spirit of the ruling and ended up complying with neither. Of course, it's the letter rather than the spirit of the law which is binding, but Yahoo seemingly got bad advice on whether they had done enough, and ended up needlessly annoying the court.

    Second, the court ruled that Yahoo could and should have set up their site so as to refuse requests from French IP addresses or which came from clickthroughs from yahoo.fr. Yahoo's defence against this (a similar line of argument is implied in the article above) was that such a ban would be easy to circumvent using an anonymiser. This misses the point. The point is that someone who goes to the trouble of using an anonymiser and avoiding yahoo.fr, is pretty clearly intentionally buying Nazi regalia in the knowledge that it is illegal to do so in France. Someone who just goes through a link saying "to research this further ..." has a pretty good chance of being able to claim that they did not know that they were doing anything wrong, but just happened to surf through. By not putting up even token barriers which require any effort at all to circumvent, Yahoo was effectively providing an alibi for French Nazis. This, in the eyes of the court, pretty much implicated them in intentionally offering a service dealing Nazi regalia in France.

    Finally, Yahoo could have put a banner on the appropriate pages warning that material was made available which was against the law of France, but refused to do so. I have absolutely no fucking idea why they refused this one, but I suspect that they just wanted to play hardball in the hope that a patriotic American court would put down an order against the French court making the fine unenforceable.

    So that's what happened in France. The French were not demanding the impossible; they were asking for a show of good faith, which Yahoo refused to give them.

    Furthermore, nobody seems to have wondered whether Yahoo's decision to get out of the Nazi regalia business was not a purely commercial decision. It certainly did not generate any really favourable publicity, and they may have received legal advice that they couldn't rely on the protection of the American court. There was certainly an avenue open to them which would have allowed them to keep on selling regalia to Americans (NB: They Didn't! and quite clearly said so in their terms of service) while satisfying the French courts. If Yahoo wanted to avoid making a test case for the feasibility of local internet regulation, that was their choice, not that of the French.

    In conclusion, the assumption running through 80% of this thread -- that this case is anything to do with the French attempting to exercise extra-territorial jurisdiction -- is incorrect.

  • is something which translates as "banalisation", or "trivialisation" of the Holocaust. To treat Nazi regalia as merely amusing bric-a-brac to be collected and traded as if they were Pez dispensers is an affront to Holocaust victims, and it is one from which the French government has decided that they deserve to be protected.
  • ...what's the "Right Thing To Do?"

    What they're doing is complying with French law (which is the right thing to do, probably), but they're not doing this because it's the Right Thing To Do.

    This in a way relates back to the Singapore story of the early 90's where that one American committed a crime in Singapore and recieved the "Singapore punishment" of a lashing. America begged and pleaded to stop the "cruel and unusual" punishment, but it was carried out.

    Too many people believe in American imperealism. So far, everyone feels it's a good thing when it comes to the internet (since America pioneered the internet, they should have the right to put their foot down in whatever country they want, right?). So, when one country finally says that they're tired of American imperealism (I'm not the least bit surprised that it's the French), we feel offended?

    Yahoo's a business. They realize that if they want to run a business in a different country in a different part of the world, they'll need to conform to another country's rules and regulations. Here's the best example I can come up with: Say Columbia began a web page where one could purchase cocaine from their website at "Rock-bottom warehouse prices and shipping to anywhere in North and South America!" I guarantee you that the US would try their darndest to stop that website from being able to opporate here in the United States. Or what if some other country believed so whole-heartedly in free speech that child pornography was legal there? Even though it might offend that country's "democratic principles," the US would try to make sure it would be blocked out here in the US.

    If our military wasn't enough, we're now spreading our entire English culture to the rest of the world. We can pay 50 million dollars to get a potentially-worth billion dollar suffix (.tv) from a country that's expected to be entirely underwater in 50 years. When we want something we can buy it. Of course, too many people don't understand that even though we're the most economically powerful country in the world, but we contain less than 5% of the world's population. Maybe we should respect the rest of the people that live on this Earth?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This in a way relates back to the Singapore story of the early 90's where that one American committed a crime in Singapore and recieved the "Singapore punishment" of a lashing. America begged and pleaded to stop the "cruel and unusual" punishment, but it was carried out.

    This American was a student at the Singapore American School and was a classmate of a very good friend of mine. About 6 months or so before he got arrested (for graffiti, by the way) he secretly put two firearms into my friends bag on a flight from Malasia to Singapore (this guy and my friend were on the basketball team together). Thank God the guns were never found because my friend could have gotten life in prison or the death penalty. This guy, whose parents were on 60 minutes whining about how their "Good Kid" had made a mistake, deserved a LOT more than a caning. True, he is now scared for life, but he should have thought about the consequences of his actions and not that "He's an American, dammit!"

    This guy was a grade A a**hole and he needed a serious attitude adjustment.

  • Eh? Why pick Israel? They've got nothing to do with this. It's the French who are complaining about Nazi stuff.

    It's kinda funny, really. They couldn't stand up to the live Nazis, so they ban stuff from dead ones. Go figure.

    -jon

  • My dad is a ww2 vet and lost many friends (he fought for America in the pacific) I suppose they died for "freedom" (don't they always?) But the end result? It's stunning how easily yahoo! cratered to this french stupidity.

    I enjoy books such as "Kursk", "Stuka Pilot", "Zero Fighter", "U Boat Commander" -- all of which tell the stories of officers, soldiers, battles and engineering feats of all the combatants of ww2.

    The leadership of Japan and Germany was awful. But the troops (and officers) -- for the most part -- did their job with pride and pain.

    One of my pals in college had a uncle who was an SS officer...the Uncle knew nothing of the death camps til near the end of the war, and was horrified by it. He was also 1/4 jewish (kept it hidden, of course). Pal still has the uniform and medals in a chest and is very proud of his uncle. My pal also served in the US Air Force.

    Soldiers fight, feel pain, and sometimes die. That is their job. It is an ugly thing to see ignorance and stupidity on an upward trend in the world...it is this type of flawed logic (that of the french government) that leads to war.

  • "American corporation kowtows to foreign nation's irrelevant laws."

    Translated roughly as, "you can't do this to me, I'm an American!" [Raiders of the Lost Ark et al.] If it were an American corporation, there would be no issue. It is, however, a multinational corporation. Yahoo could solve the issue, as has been pointed out, by getting their physical presence out of France. They've decided to go for lowest common denominator instead.

    I don't see that this is bad news for the Internet so much as bad news for corporate interests on the Internet. A corporate interest like Yahoo that wants to have an office here and there is going to suffer from the same old real-world restrictions that brick-and-mortar businesses have had since year dot.

    But on the other hand, this creates a niche for the purely virtual store and the virtual co-op. Whether for profit or not, pick whatever country best suits you (Sealand, perhaps) and set up your server there and there only. There's been no indication so far that any other country can do much about you other than the usual fairly ineffectual IP blocking. I'm also confident that freenet-like technologies will improve such that the "physical location of the server" becomes a null concept: it's a cloud, not a box.

    Even so, it's good to have ranting paranoiacs like Jamie to keep us on our toes. Keep up the good work.

  • AC states that he "south will rise again" saying has nothing to do with people from the south doing anything, and you know that. He further queries Have you no common sense?

    That particular phrase means a lot of things, ranging from `we will rise up, cast you off and this time we're not going to play nice' to `we're going to conquer every obstacle you Yankee carpetbaggin bastards have placed in our way and then some, beat you at your own game and reveal you for the hypocritical Puritan-descended horse-rumps you are.' The meaning varies from speaker to speaker and from time to time.

    I generally use it more in the latter sense than in the former. Wreaking war upon New England and her allies is not feasible. Taking them on head-to-head, beating them in the economic game and displaying the value of our own culture is.

  • that translation is incredibly confusing and unreliable, I'm afraid. The analysis in "Les Echos" dated January 02 is much better.

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