Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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?
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!!!
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
...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.
no
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.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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:
As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.
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.
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.
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
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
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.
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?
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.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.