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Court to Revisit French Suit Over Yahoo's Nazi Auctions

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on February 11, 2005 - 11:06am.
Sunnyvale, Calif. -- The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Thursday said that it will rehear some arguments in a suit filed by a pair of French human rights groups trying to ban the sale of Nazi-related items on sites run by Yahoo, the Associated Press reported. The Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League, both based in France, first sued Yahoo five years ago, winning a French court order to block Yahoo's sites in France from selling Nazi memorabilia. Selling or displaying racist material is a crime in France. Yahoo, however, kept the items -- which included swastika-laden flags and excerpts from Hitler's "Mein Kampf" -- on its more popular U.S.-based site, which is still accessible to French surfers. Following another court ruling in 2001, Yahoo theoretically now owes more than $5 million in fines. "If American companies have to worry that foreign judgments entered against them might be enforceable, it could end up with companies censoring their web sites," Mary Catherine Wirth, a senior corporate council at Yahoo, told AP.
tags: Law | Yahoo | French | Court | Nazi Auctions |