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Yahoo is being sued in France for selling Nazi Memorobilia on its auction site. In France, it is illegal to sell racist material.
The court case has been going back and forth for a few years now, with Yahoo trying to get US courts to intervene on it's behalf (the argument: Yahoo is a US based company, and should have to follow US laws.)
A recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that the French courts had every right to rule against Yahoo:
Ferguson said if Yahoo wants to continue selling items on a site that can be accessed around the world, the company must assume the risk that it could violate laws of other countries and be subject to more lawsuits.
AP Article [hosted.ap.org]
took a while to find a non-subscription paper that carried the story
Ok, so tell me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this effectively mean that we all now have to become legal experts in the laws on every nation on the planet? Because my site can be viewed anywhere, I now have to make sure that my content violates no nation's laws, otherwise I become liable in that nation and can be sued, regardless of where I'm actually based?
The US court wasn't ruling on the validity of the French suit, just saying they weren't coming to Yahoo's rescue. Of course anyone on earth *can* sue you. Doesn't mean they have grounds, or would be successful though.
I wonder if Yahoo's auction TOS included bits about jurisdiction of disputes, that the user is responsible for following their own local laws, and/or that legality of specific auctions in different jurisdictions is the responsibility of the individual placing the auction... Seems like any or all of those would make a decent argument, unless France's legal system doesn't regard contracts with the same reverence the US does.
government must give prior approval to the content of all websites owned by French citizens living anywhere in the world before one can upload the files to the server...
Ahh, so it's a French Gov't thing, mostly.
edit reason: took out postscript
