France: Criminal Charges Against Yahoo's Ex-CEO

Hank Reardon writes: "According to this C|NET article, former Yahoo CEO Timothy Koogle is being charged criminally for allowing the sale of various Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo's auctions pages. Ther article notes that the charges were filed in regardless of the offending items being removed from the French Yahoo! pages. Is it just me or do the lines between national and international law seem to be blurring?"

Comments

Freedom of speech?

[tfurrows]

Isn't supression of this sort akin to the supression the Nazis encouraged?

Also, though the Nazi movement is an embarrasing (to say the absolute least) stain on the history of mankind, is not not nonetheless a piece of our history.

I would hate to have our children forget about the horrors the Nazis caused, and censorship of this kind seems to be aimed at that.

A far greater danger...

[quantax]

The Nazi regime was horrible, but it is far more more dangerous to try to 'ignore' it. Those who are committed to forgetting history are bound to repeat it. Don't follow the path of ignorance.

Dmitry Sklyarov double standard

[andaru]

The judge ruled that French laws don't apply to U.S. businesses, but it obviously doesn't work the other way around, as in the case of Dmitry Sklyarov.

They should have waited to file charges until Timothy Koogle was vacationing on the French Riviera, rather than having to try to extradite him.

I guess it's time to brush up on your foreign law, since we will all have to start obeying the laws of every other country in the world, including those that are mutually exclusive.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov double standard

[Skapare]

Free Speech is illegal in China. Death penalty may be the result. If you speak bad about the Chinese government, no matter what country you are in, they might demand your extradition to China to stand trial and face the firing squad. This is what can happen if we set any precedent to allow foreign countries to dictate what is done beyond their own national territory. Unfortunately both the United States (Sklyarov) and France (Koogle) are setting just such precedents. And this is very serious business. Citizens of these countries need to inform their government representatives of the grave risk involved in such a precedent exposing them to the extraditions of other countries for what is perfectly legal at home.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov double standard

[DavidTC]

In many places, learning about Nazis is part of the school curriculum. It's not that farfetched that said curriculum is actually written down as part of state policy, and that it is also state policy that you have to puchase textbooks from one of these ten suppliers, thus forcing purchasers to purchase Nazi 'paraphernalia'. (Whatever the hell 'paraphernalia' means in that context.)

While such textbooks probably aren't illegal in France, which just seems to care that they don't have neo-Nazis walking around, I'd wager to bet many of them are illegal in Germany, because Germany frankly doesn't allow any presentation of WWII that isn't government approved. (Of course, the reason it isn't approved is simply because the textbook manufactures don't care enough to submit their books, but that's beside the point.)

Ergo, there are situtations where schools in some countries are required, as part of their educational mandate that was handed down by the government, to purchase things that may be illegal in other countries.

Another example: In Quebec, it is required that you have French and Eglish on all signs, and that they be equal size. In various cities in America, there are laws saying that your main sign must be in English, or at least the English must be larger than your other signs. (This is to stop 'Chinatowns' and whatnot from becoming completely unnavigatable by police and just random passerbyers.) These laws are in direct contradiction to each other.

And, of course, there is the very very obvious one of 'you must drive on the left', vs. 'you must drive on the right', though I think it would get pretty surreal pretty quickly if every government tried to enforce their traffic laws everywhere.

There are also the 'wildly different' laws that, despite having the exact same intention and pretty close legal framework, were created with no regard to each other and thus directly conflict in different parts. For example, common law marriage times are different in different countries. Though I don't know the laws, let's say that if you live with someone for two years you're married in England, and it's three years in Louisiana. If you have sex with your common law wife of two and a half years in England, you can be arrested for rape in Louisiana if you happen to mention you're married, because a) You aren't married in Louisiana, and b) It's rape if you trick the other person into thinking you're married to them.

Obviously that isn't the intent of the law, and you wouldn't be arrested even if you did it in Louisiana (Countries pretty much just accept if you're from another country and say you're married, that you are, and they'd have to prove you knew you weren't married there anyway.), but conflicts between different country's laws happen all the time, and it's crazy to try to enforce them in anything outsides the boundaries of this country for exactly this reason.