A five-year-old lawsuit by two French human rights groups against Yahoo over online auctions of Nazi memorabilia and items will be re-heard by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The 9th Circuit Court overturned a lower court ruling that said showing or offering auction items on pages accessible around the world meant Yahoo could be prone to the laws of other countries and of more concurrent lawsuits. Among other things, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that federal judge Jeremy Fogel had no authority to hear the case.
The kicker: The court didn’t explain how it came to its decision. In a two-sentence ruling February 10, the court ordered both sides to argue their cases in front of the full 11-judge 9th Circuit Court, an order likely to be fulfilled in the spring, according to several reports.
The Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League won a French court order in 2000 forcing Yahoo to keep French Netizens from seeing Nazi-related auctions on Yahoo pages, since French law bans displaying or selling racist material.
At first Yahoo battled the French courts and is believed to owe an accumulated $5 million worth of fines, after those courts began socking the California-based Web portal and search engine with over $13,000 a day in fines for every day Yahoo didn’t comply. Yahoo yanked the Nazi auctions from its French subsidiary but left them among the main site, asking a U.S. federal court to hold the French orders violated the U.S. First Amendment and posed “a chilling effect” for Internet service providers and free speech.
Yahoo senior corporate counsel Mary Catherine Wirth told reporters that American companies having to worry about foreign judgments being enforceable could mean “companies censoring their Websites.” But Richard Jones, counsel for the French organizations, said there was little reason to believe the 9th Circuit Court would rule in Yahoo’s favor.
