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The American internet service provider Yahoo! has banned the sale of Nazi memorabilia from all its auctions sites.The ban has been in effect since the middle of January this year. A Yahoo spokesman denied that the decision was in response to the French government ruling. Last year the French courts demanded Yahoo's American site to ban the auctions of Nazi memorabilia to French users. In France it is illegal to sell such material. The Yahoo spokesman said the company did not want to profit from items that glorified or promoted hatred and included in the ban were items that promoted hate groups such as the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. |
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| America's freedom of speech versus France's government. |
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Last year in May, the French government gave Yahoo three months to ban auctions of Nazi memorabilia to anyone living in France. In November, Yahoo explained to the French courts that creating a system which prevents French users from accessing an American site with auctions of Nazi memorabilia is not yet possible. The French Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez was branded naive by the Yahoo's defence for thinking it was even a possibility. The founder of the company, Jerry Yang said in the French newspaper Liberation: "we have a presence in 23 countries. Everywhere, we respect the local laws. Even in China and Singapore, where the governments impose content restrictions, we succeed very well in working with the authorities. In China we respect censorship, especially of political matter. "In France, on Yahoo France, we ensure that all we do is legal in this jurisdiction. But to ask us to intervene on our American servers, that, no, I have never seen. The French are unique." Yahoo announced on January 10 that it would proceed to self regulate online auctions by screening all items beforehand. A software package designed to scrutinise auction sites will check the descriptions to find any sales of Nazi or race-hate memorabilia. Filtering systems may pick out non offensive items such as Anne Frank's Diary, as a simple ban would associate with the word nazi with an offensive item.Yahoo have said that should this occur, auctions sites may appeal to have the site scrutinised by people, rather than a computer software programme. In Germany a similar situation of regulating the internet exists. Under German law it is a crime to disseminate Nazi propaganda or deny the Holocaust. In December last year, the German Supreme Court ruled that any websites posting Nazi material created outside the country, but aimed internet users inside Germany, could be prosecuted under German law. Up to 90 percent of the neo-Nazi sites based in foreign countries originate in America, where protection lies in its constitution of freedom of speech. Other sites and internet companies have found ways of stopping offensive auctions on the internet. The internet book provider, Amazon, uses in-house software to recognise postal addresses. This prevents anything illegal being shipped over, and on the German site they have banned Hitler's book Mein Kampf. A rival online auction service, eBay , uses a software programme which recognises French language browsers. Also eBay's French site does not allow users to search for Nazi related items. The company also bans hate-materials in Germany, Austria and Italy where the sale of such objects is illegal.
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