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Dutch Judge Cracks Down on Hyperlinks
The webzine Radikal (mirrored in Holland, because it has been banned in Germany) published several articles on disabling railroad trains (in the context of preventing shipments of nuclear materials); the German national railroad discovered it, and the fun has been going on ever since. Rejo Zenger writes "Today a dutch judge ordered Indymedia NL on the request of the Deutsche Bahn to remove some links from a page on their website. These links were pointing to the mirrors of Radikal sites. A few of these sites were containing two articles that have been forbidden in court before. The links were indirect links (surface links) instead of direct ones to the articles (deeplinks). So, none of the links was pointing to the offending articles directly! The judge "orders Indymedia immediately after receiving this sentence to remove and to keep removed the hyperlinks, which are placed on (a) website(s) under the control of Indymedia, if those hyperlinks lead directly or indirectly to the Radikal articles [...]". This is BAD. As almost all links indirectly point to the Radikal articles we can abolish the web now. The announcement, Dutch with English to follow shortly. The decision of the judge (dutch only)." Indymedia's press release (English) covers it pretty well. Update: 06/21 19:54 GMT by M : My summary in the first sentence has been corrected.
Maybe it is good to have understand the whole story from the beginning ...
...
l )
... .. money is an issue ..
It starts way back in 1997 when the German magazine places some of their issues online at a dutch ISP (XS4ALL). In these issues they describe how to derail german trains.
A German Court rules that these documents are illegal and these publications are illegal in Germany. German ISP are orderded to block the URL to XS4ALL. Because blocking something on the internet is virtually impossible these blocks were lifted because a lot of people started to publish mirrors of these documents.
Back to April this year
The German Railroads suddenly notice that these documents are still online and available and through a (dutch) court order forces XS4ALL to take these pages down.
XS4ALL is applealing this decision and they are still in court (you can check the XS4ALL pages at http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/radikal.htm
At the same time Indymedia plublishes a list with mirrors where these documents can be found
and that is now illegal to. They want to appleal, but as always
I hope this helps.
Rigolo
The ruling states that, although the links themselves were indirect, they were accompanied by detailed instructions on how to locate the pages in question. It was this combination which the judge ruled illegal, not the actual link per se.
This aspect should go down well with the Code=Speech crowd: source code (in this case a direct link) is essentially the same as a description/poem/diagram describing same.
...otherwise it's trivial to circumvent the prohibition on direct links only.
For instance, suppose linking directly to document A is banned. Then the hosting site could simply create a page with a "wink wink" link to document A, and the site against which the injunction is placed could link the the page with the "wink wink" link, with identical intent as with a direct link.
In other words, it's perfectly reasonable for a ban to also include indirect links OF WHATEVER LENGTH (arbitrary numbers of pages of "Are you sure? Are you really sure? etc") so long as intent is clear (e.g. putting up silly links to Disney on each of the "are you sure" pages should not absolve them). One can even make a case for neglect if the linker should have known better according to a reasonable-person standard.
Of course, even if the ruling notes this justification -- I don't read Dutch, and I'm leery of trusting a web translator on legalese -- Indymedia isn't exactly an independent with regards to their own case, and probably wouldn't mention this.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The verdict mentions the sites as well and should therefore be illegal!
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
It's easy to be for free speech, if you like the someone else is saying. It's requires some courage to support free speech that you disagree with.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The newsletter found a new home on a server in the Netherlands some years ago after publication in Germany was forbidden. The authors and also some "usual suspects" were facing criminal prosecution. Houses and offices were searched, etc.
Since the German jurisdiction ends at the Netherland's border nowadays, Deutsche Bahn filed civil suits in the netherlands.