The Compuserve trial was about access to pr0n newsgroups - the german head executive of Compuserve was held responsible for all the stuff in the newsgroups they offered access to. Since some of these groups contained pictures and stories which are illegal in Germany, he was accused of spreading illegal pornography. As a consequence, Compuserve/AOL totally blocked acces to all newsgroups containing sex related material (even those groups about gay/lesbian rights or abuse recovery).
I was working for CompuServe at the time (well, CompuServe Pacific anyway) and it was a little more serious than that - they ended up blocking, among other things, all alt.* newsgroups for all customers - not just for the Germans and not just sex related groups. They didn't have anything in place for selective blocking based on customer location, and they figured that it was easiest just to block everything alt than try to sort through all the groups.
It brought up some interesting stuff about jurisdiction, control and the global nature of the net etc before that stuff was really a well known issue.
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I was working for CompuServe at the time (well, CompuServe Pacific anyway) and it was a little more serious than that - they ended up blocking, among other things, all alt.* newsgroups for all customers - not just for the Germans and not just sex related groups. They didn't have anything in place for selective blocking based on customer location, and they figured that it was easiest just to block everything alt than try to sort through all the groups.
It brought up some interesting stuff about jurisdiction, control and the global nature of the net etc before that stuff was really a well known issue.