Deutsche Bahn to Sue Google

Many readers including this Anonymous Coward have written about this case: "After the DB-Deutsche Bahn (German railway comp.) won a case against Dutch ISP xs4all to remove 2 articles that were hosted on one of their servers, the DB now is going to sue Google (Wednesday) and probably in 2 days time Yahoo! and Altavista. Infoworld has an article about it. More background information about previous attempts to censor the same site can be found here and here's list of mirrors." And Yes, "Access is Forbidden."

Comments

Just out of curiosity...

[L-Wave]

what is the motive for suing a search engine to remove your pages? isn't it practically free advertising? Also, could they win a suit against goole? I'm fairly certain that google mentions on the site, that to have your pages removed from thier DB, you jsut have to send them an email with your URL and asking to bt removed....isnt sueing jumping the gun a little bit?

Re:Just out of curiosity...

[Alsee]

a handbook on how to destroy rail tracks is hardly worth fighting for - but even in those instances, freedom of speech must be absolute

but it sucks having to do it over some dangerous wingnuts' propaganda...

As I understand it the the censored article was a descrition of a rather sophisticated form of sabotage. They trigger the railway system's built in fail-safe mechanisms and the trains slow to a few MPH. Minimal damage that actually results in safer than normal operation.

You can disagree with their position. You can arrest them when they sabotage equipment. But you have to respect their commitment to safety.

-

Not again

[cholokoy]

Are there people related to scientologists? :P

OTOH, these are very legal concerns that the linked pages contain information that, in the hands of the wrong party could be dangerous to their operations, and being a public utility, they have to be concerned.

This is iteresting because it has dire implications on page linking in general.

Re:Not again

[MouseR]

A brick, and any information about making or using bricks, can be dangerous in the wrong hands too; we should ban everything about those as well.

Blocking a page about some idea to sabotage is not going to make such extremists go away or stop their actions.


Bricks are meant to build houses. Yet, you can use bricks to maim people.

On the other hand, guidebooks for destroying railroad tracks server no other purpose than destroying railroad tracks in attempts to disrupt the service, with the unfortunate possibility of killing people.

Your analogy is too simplistic to be considered any valid. Free speech needs not be associated with destruction and killings. For this would definitely put and end to free speech.

subsidiaries

[mbbac]

So, when is Google pulling its offices out of Germany in order to avoid this lawsuit? A company such as Google should not operate in a country where free speech is not lawful.

Re:subsidiaries

[Cally]

A company such as Google should not operate in a country where free speech is not lawful.

What do you mean by "a company such as Google"? If you mean "a company which is popular with geeks and Slashdotters" - well, you're right, in that some of the shine may gradually rub off their geek-friendly, free-speech protecting image. OTOH, plenty of large well-known corporations do business with China, say, or in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,.. ( insert your favourite repressive non-democratic regime...) IBM organised the Holocaust, you know, and Cisco built and support the Great Firewall of China (and who knows who supplies the software tools that pull out Falun Gong-related email from the wire and queue a request for the secret police to pay the poster a visit at 4am?) (actually, it's probably Free software: but that's morally defensible, in that the Free software community are not getting rich supporting repression.)

Re:subsidiaries

[mbbac]

First off all the "Deusche Bahn" is AFAIK a private company despite it's name. So it's not germany "outlawing" free speech it's a private company suing another company.

I did not confuse Deutsche Bahn with the German government. I was worried that German law enables Deutsche Bahn to file this lawsuit and expect to win it.

Second, imagine some radical group in the US. posting instructions on how to hijack some planes and fly them into skyscrapers on the internet. Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out?

You're probably right, and that is a sad fact. Unfortunately, there is presently an overwhelming psuedo-patriotism in the United States today. These monkey spanks act without thought and support Ashcroft et al in their pursuit of limiting our freedom -- which is the most unpatriotic thing one could do.

Re:subsidiaries

[daoine]

Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out? There goes your "free speech"...

Free speech is not a blanket clause to let you say whatever you want.

The first amendment is still bound within the confines of the law. For example, it's illegal to threaten the lives of certain government officials. No first amendment argument is gonna help there.

The FBI might go after said site. They might go after sites with similar content, in hopes of getting to a network behind it. But I highly doubt they would go after Google for merely indexing it. That's like suing the phone company for listing a criminal in the phone book.

Re:subsidiaries

[aCC]

That's like suing the phone company for listing a criminal in the phone book.

True. This wouldn't happen in the USA. It's like suing Napster for providing the infrastructure to share songs... oh wait... damn.

Re:subsidiaries

[ChaosDiscordSimple]

Second, imagine some radical group in the US. posting instructions on how to hijack some planes and fly them into skyscrapers on the internet. Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out?

Did the September 11th hijackers visit such a helpful web site to learn how to hijack planes? No? Then what harm can putting the information up have? The bad guys already know. Can putting the information up potentially help? Certainly. I wish more bad guys would put their evil plans up on the web. Then the FBI could read the documents, identify the security weaknesses the bad guys are planning on using and fix the security weaknesses.

Criminals are perfectly capable and willing to spread censored information amoung themselves. After all, if you've decided to sacrifice your life to kill innocents, what's going to stop you from making some photocopies?

Re:subsidiaries

[Relic of the Future]

The argument that lost Napster the case was that their infrastructure was used (almost) *exclusively* to share songs.

Phones have lots of uses. So does Google. Although I imagine xs4all has more uses than just posting anarchist links, and they lost, so what do I know.

And the interesting part is...

[Munelight]

"Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."

Have these people not been paying attention lately?

Re:And the interesting part is...

[Anonymous Coward]

They obviously haven't heard of the latest developments in internet routing technology: The local government of Duesseldorf wants to restrict access to websites which violate German law but can not be shut down because they are hosted in countries where the content is legal. Therefore a german university and Webwasher teamed up to develop a transparent filtering system which is supposed to scale well enough to be installed by every ISP. The Deutsche Bahn could just have the Google-URLs added to the filter and avoid a costly lawsuit.

Wayback

[benjymous]

I assume if they're sucessful with sueing Google, then they'll go after the Wayback Machine's archive of the site next

Not suing in America

[blankmange]

Notice that DB is not suing Google in an American court, citing that they would probably not be successful due to our freedom of speech laws....interesting juxtaposition with our constant bashing of other countries (NZ for ex) in limiting their citizens access/freedom to speech and info.... Here's to Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista -- stick to your guns!!!

Dont they realize...

[bludstone]

...that by attacking sites like this, they are simply drawing MORE attention to what they are trying to shut down?

By now dozens of people have mirrored the site, and the possibility of it going away forever has diminished greatly.

Fools.

These "Autonome" have a point, but ...

[Qbertino]

they're a threat to innocent citizens.
Posting instructions of how to commit crimes (sabotage in this case) should be prohibited across boarders. The poloitical background of this is that there is a very fierce anti-nuclear-power movement in germany supportet by 'left' activists.
Think of Greenpeace activists with no mind about inocent third parties and you'll get the picture.
I hate the "Bahns" miserable missmanagement (I use the train on a regular basis here in germany) and I shure as hell oppose to nuclear power but none the less, these people are criminals and they are a shame to peacefull resitance against "Atomkraft".
Sueing a searchengine is of course somewhat of a twist, but I hope this can raise and clarify some issues concerning morally doubtfull internet content and at least leverage trans-european law for this. I might help to know that the german gouverment holds large shares of the "Deutsche Bahn".

Re:Not the cache.

[benjymous]

Google isnt responsible for the results they return - are they?

Just like Napster weren't responsible for the copyrighted music that it's users were sharing?

Host Name Change

[Captain Large Face]

In other news, www.xs4all.nl will change to www.xs4allexceptcertainanarchistpublications.nl to represent recent events.

Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:

• Secure Their Systems
• Find Better Ways to Transport Radioactive Waste

As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.

A couple of facts worth pointing out

[Kemal]

1. The concerned Radikal publication is from 1996/1997; Its banning/blackage in The Netherlands was unsuccessful then. Why a lawsuit now? Is it because Deutsche Bahn is (again) planning to transport nuclear waste material soon?

2. The Dutch court has made a 'tussenvonnis' (mid-sentence?). XS4ALL has said to await the final judgement.

Oh, I know some Germans who would disagree...

[Ethelred Unraed]

Funny, I live in Germany and am married to a German woman who just *loves* Hogan's Heroes. (Dubbed into German, of course.) And she's not the only German I know who likes it or quotes from it. (For the record, Col. Klink is dubbed with a Saxon accent; Sgt. Schultz is dubbed with a thick Bavarian accent. Which is actually kinda cute.)

There's no accounting for taste, anyway.

The obvious point is, if it's shown on German TV and Germans apparently like to watch it, it doesn't seem to be too insulting to Germans, now does it? (So much for your attempt at political correctness.)

You want to see something *really* politically incorrect about WWII? Try the British comedy "Allo Allo"...you know, the series with the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klump", a gay German tank commander, a Prussian general whose idea of politics is to shoot French peasants and so on. (And again, my wife loves it, as do I.)

Cheers,

Ethelred

right, boys and girls, time for counterstrike

[Anonymous Coward]

Put up as many free sites as you can hosting the material. Post the materials as articles right here, at random. Annoy DB wildly and continually until they learn that trying to suppress speech just results in more people hearing about it.

If you're feeling in the mood, e-mail DB indicating that the Internet has eliminated the ability to suppress speech, and provide links to said sites, pointing out that people will create more and more instances of these sites (on servers hosted by various countries) until the lawsuit is withdrawn.

Make sure you indicate quite clearly that you are in complete agreement that acts of sabotage are inappropriate, illegal and reprehensible (even if you sympathise with the environmentalist cause, this isn't relevant here), but that this has nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with freedom of information.

Re:The whole story.

[Anonymous Coward]

And actually, the link you provided contains the text to be censored, unlike the google cache of the xs4all.nl page which is useless. Thanks a lot, although I'm not planning to sabotage the DB I found the read very interesting. :)

More info about XS4ALL

[phyxeld]

xs4all has also taken heat for hosting some anti-scientology pages.
There's some interesting stuff about when they got raided by the CoS (church of scientology) here.

Excerpt: A corporation like CoS, having its' own security service with a capacity equal to that of a small country, would scare the shit out of any normal firm. XS4ALL, however, is NOT a normal middle-sized firm. It is an ex-foundation, an offshoot of the Dutch hacker-magazine "HackTic". The staff at XS4ALL are ALL cyberpunks, former long-haired anarchists happy to find themselves in charge of a company so fast growing, that it is considered important for the Dutch national economy. And as you can tell from its' name, this is a company which wants to give everyone access to information, worldwide.