SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) Yahoo Inc. will likely have a tough time getting U.S. courts to intervene in a dispute over the sale of Nazi memorabilia in France after a federal appeals court ruling Monday.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a U.S. district court judge did not have authority to hear a case or make a decision that could affect two French human rights groups trying to ban the sale of Nazi-related items on Yahoo's popular auction site.
France's Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League sued the world's leading Web portal in 2000 and won a French court order requiring Yahoo to block Internet surfers in France from auctions selling Nazi memorabilia. French law bars the display or sale of racist material.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo stripped Nazi memorabilia including flags emblazoned with swastikas and excerpts from Adolf Hitler's ``Mein Kampf'' from its French subsidiary, yahoo.fr.
To the anger of French Jews, Holocaust survivors, their descendants and other activists, Yahoo kept such items on its vastly more popular site, yahoo.com, which is based in the United States but accessible to Web surfers anywhere in the world.
Yahoo filed a lawsuit in San Jose in December 2002, asking the U.S. District Court to rule that the French order was invalid because it violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose concluded that he had jurisdiction over French defendants, but Monday's ruling reversed that decision. In a 2-1 decision, Ninth Circuit Judge Warren Ferguson emphasized that the French groups had not sued Yahoo in U.S. courts, so the case was ``not ripe.''
``The district court should have abstained from hearing the case,'' Ferguson wrote.
Although Monday's ruling doesn't require Yahoo to change the way it operates yahoo.com or any other site, it will likely make it tougher for Yahoo to argue its case in U.S. courts.
Ferguson said if Yahoo wants to continue selling items on a site that can be accessed around the world, the company must assume the risk that it could violate laws of other countries and be subject to more lawsuits.
``Yahoo cannot expect both to benefit from the fact that its content may be viewed around the world and to be shielded from the resulting costs,'' Ferguson wrote in the 35-page decision, Judge Melvin Brunetti, dissented, saying because French groups specifically ``targeted'' Yahoo in California, U.S. courts should have jurisdiction in the case.
The opinion is a small but important victory for French human rights groups, said attorney Richard Jones, who represented the Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League.
``Yahoo would like the world to be covered by America's First Amendment because that would make it easier for Yahoo to do business around the world,'' said Jones, of the San Francisco office of Covington & Burling. ``But that puts Yahoo in the ironic position of trying to impose American values on the rest of the world.''
Attorney Robert Vanderet, who represented Yahoo for Los Angeles-based O'Melveny & Myers, said the opinion ``really doesn't mean much.'' The ruling may make it tougher for Yahoo to get this case heard in U.S. courts but the French groups must first sue Yahoo in the United States for breaking the French court order.
``This means that Yahoo would have to wait until they tried to enforce the French order in the United States to have it declared unconstitutional,'' Vanderet said. ``It doesn't disturb the court's ruling it just says that you have to wait until they come into this country to try to enforce it.''
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