Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo! Given Reprieve In French Court Battle
Spudley writes "The BBC is reporting that Yahoo! has been given a reprieve by a French court. The judge had previously ruled that they must block access in France to any Nazi-related auctions on their site. The judge has now asked for a panel to be set up, to provided technical information, before he decides the case." For more information, check out original article about this. It's a pretty interesting debate - how do national laws apply to the Internet?
My grandfather fought in the Russo-Finnish Winter War (1939-1940), and later volunteered to serve in the SS for roughly two years. After his contract was finished, he returned to Finland having fought extensively on the Eastern Front. He then reentered the Finnish armed forces, until he was demobilised in 1944.
He volunteered for the SS because he wanted to a chance to fight the Russians, who he blamed for the loss of his home city Viipuri. I was in total awe of my grandfather as a child, although he never mentioned his wartime experiences. In fact the only time he ever alluded to it was when he expressed disgust at how the American film industry often portrays Axis soldiers.
Now my grandfather is dead, all I have to remember him by is my memories. Whether it is "right or wrong" or not I wear an SS belt buckle in remembrance of him. This doesn't make me a Nazi - I vote Liberal, my flatmate is Jewish and my girlfriend is French.
I don't know what I'm trying to say here - perhaps it's just that the victors in any war are able to write their own version of history. In the French case the official line is to try and obscure their collaboration in the Holocaust by emphasising the (negligible) role of the Resistance. I find this as offensive as German skinheads, so I can't help feeling that this court case smacks of hypocrisy. Perhaps the French should come to terms with their own past (and present in the case of their National Front) before trying to censure what their citizens can and can't do on the Internet.
Chris
I have heard (back in the dim mists of Boy Scouts or some other "astronomy as armchair entertainment" context) that the crooked shape that is called the swastika in northern europe is derived from the constellation of Ursa Major (alternately the "Big Dipper", or the "Plow").
Four seasons, and if you trace it out against the sky at the same time of the evening during the different seasons, it lays out the shape. I'm probably getting some major details wrong, but the gist is right.
In other News:
France has recently outlawed people looking up and to the north during the period of sundown to sunup. "It is for their own good", said Pierre Le Pieu, played by Richard O'Brien, "We don't want a disturbed population - last time that happened, they ran around and chopped off the heads of the people in power".
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
There are three very different questions at stake here, and most posts I see seem to mix them all randomly.
First, there is the question of how appropriate this French law is, that forbids the sale of Nazi items. Personally, I think it's a very stupid law. However, please mind when discussing this question that it is unrelated to the Internet, and also that we're talking French law. So the question should be discussed in that context. In fact, I don't think Slashdot is a very appropriate place to discuss that question (yet most posts I see which make any sense refer specifically to that question).
Second, there is the question of the applicability of the law of a certain country to a web site that is not located in that country. Personally, I think it shouldn't apply. However, please note in discussing that question that the nature of the law (good or bad) should not be a factor. Nor should the name of the country. If we agree that the good laws of the United States should apply to non-US sites on the net, then the evil laws of Western Turumumbolia (some obscure country you've never heard of) should apply just the same.
Third, there is the purely technical question of whether Yahoo! can, in fact, filter out (nearly all) French users from their site. And the answer, I think, is yes, it is technically possible. A friend of mine has downloaded the list of all IP blocks for France from the RIPE database: there are a little over 20000, and it would be a fairly simple hashtable lookup to filter them. We're working on a proof of concept. (Even though I must repeat that I disapprove of the use of the filtering. But that is an entirely different question, in fact two entirely different questions as I've just explained.) This would not filter all French users, but with a reasonable approximation it would.
Also, I do wish we had a little less gratuitous France-bashing and gallophobia around. Certainly we have a case of an absurd law, here, but every country has absurd laws, this is not news (I did not see much americanophobia surface every time the DMCA was mentioned, for example). More importantly, the France-bashing in question is utterly offtopic (relevant to none of the three questions I mentioned) and irrelevant (not to mention, a troll and flamebait to some extent).
One of the problems with enforcing a law like this is determining when to stop enforcing it. Case in point: What constitutes a "Nazi-related" item? There are some obvious examples that everybody would probably agree on .. for example, an authentic Swastika flag used by the Third Reich would doubtless be classified as Nazi-related.
However, what about something like Hitler's book Mein Kampf? Is it Nazi-related? Inasmuch as the book is about his youth and his early days in the Nazi party, the answer would probably be "yes." But does it fall under the same general category as general Nazi memorabilia such as flags, silverware, etc.? The book arguably has some value to society because it serves as a window into the soul of one of the sickest, vilest human beings ever to walk the planet. You can't effectively battle what you don't understand, and so you might make the case that the book's intimate portrait of Hitler's mindset and thought processes are more important than its objectionable content.
What about Raiders of the Lost Ark? Is it Nazi-related?
The problem here is no different than it is any other time a government or group attempts to censor or "protect" its citizens/constituents from material that it deems harmful, offensive, or dangerous. "Harmful, offensive, and dangerous" are not black-and-white litmus tests that can be applied equally in all situations. When a government or group takes it upon itself to decide what people can see/say/read/etc., they are engaging in the intellectual equivalent of book-burning. Ironically, the Nazis were very much into book-burning.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground