Court dismisses Yahoo's free speech lawsuit

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Why does it have to be all or none? I think there are some valid points on both sides:
1) The U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech. Though this doesn't include hate speech, French courts do not have jurisdiction in America.
2) Since the French legal system defined the content to be unacceptable, it seems reasonable that sites outside France should not serve that content to viewers within France.

The key is that these two seemingly incompatible judicial verdicts on the same content can be reconciled - it isn't that difficult for a web site to check what country an IP is in and thereby deliver a modified page, perhaps with a message noting that the full page has content deemed illegal by the viewer's government. There are certainly ways to get around such restrictions (e.g. anonymizer, etc), but for the average usage scenario, even a rudimentary implementation should do the trick and cover the bases most of the time.

One last point: we Americans have begun lately to interpret "free speech" as meaning there should be no restriction on what we can say - that any attempt to restrict speech is censorship. This is not what the founding fathers intended. There have always been cases that were not included, since it was mainly intended to ensure that political dissent without retribution would be allowed. Examples of speech traditionally restricted include public use of obscenities, slander, and yes, hate speech.

Posted by: techboy_z   Posted on: 01/13/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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