French court sets a bad -- and ridiculous -- precedent

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:06 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 23, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
French court sets a bad -- and ridiculous -- precedent

Even a schoolchild can probably identify the places in the world where local governments still don't allow adults to enjoy the free exchange of information.

They're the kind of places where movies and newspapers are subject to ruthless government censorship (assuming the government doesn't simply produce and distribute the whole shebang by itself, monopoly-style) -- where quotas are set on imported foreign information and entertainment, and all are carefully counted and monitored ... under threat of hefty fines or even prison.

Places like Singapore -- where you have to belong to the one dominant party to write for the monopoly daily newspaper.

Places like Red China and a lot of the "former" Soviet Union, for instance, where it's still against the law to spread factual information which may tend to bring the ruling government into "disrepute." Places like, you know ...

France.

In a landmark ruling Monday, a Paris court ordered the web service Yahoo! -- located in Santa Clara, Calif., which is not in France -- to somehow block Internet web access from France to an auction site where Nazi memorabilia is sold. Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez gave Yahoo! three months to figure out a way to keep Frenchmen from seeing such stuff, or Yahoo! will be fined $13,000 for each day it ignores the French court's order.

Really.

Fortunately, Yahoo! responded appropriately -- pretty much quoting General Mcauliffe in Bastogne -- as lawyers for the firm pointed out the French court has no jurisdiction over its operations, and vowed they ain't gonna do it.

Good. If Yahoo! has any forfeitable assets under French jurisdiction, the proper solution is to get them well out of sight within 90 days -- the likely result of such attempted censorship thus being that such nations will lose foreign investment and find themselves increasingly cut off from commerce with the rest of a world being quickly liberated by the information revolution.

Yes, the Nazis and their works were evil -- thoroughly so. But that doesn't make it any more reprehensible to buy and sell tattered war souvenirs bearing their crooked cross, than it does for Frenchmen to hang saint-like portraits of the tyrant Napoleon in their dining rooms, or for coin collectors to buy and sell depictions of the various Roman emperors in silver or bronze -- with the issues of those who showed the most notably murderous depravity generally fetching the highest prices.

The correct response to anyone who perversely promotes the Nazi or fascist cause is to reply with solid evidence of the evil such collectivist doctrines produce -- not by banning such discussions before they can happen. Time has shown that evil hates exposure ... and thrives far better in the fetid dark.

Of course, the French court's order also happens to be unenforceable. In this cybernetic age, how long would it take a Frenchmen really determined to access such a site to rent himself an e-mail address based in Andorra or the Channel Islands -- or to log on through a "re-mailer" which would present the appearance that the user is tucked away safe and sound in the suburbs of Helsinki?

The French lawsuit was brought by two French advocacy groups: The Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-racism and Anti-Semitism League.

The plaintiffs should be ashamed. The goals of these groups may be noble, but can they really fail to realize they thus set a precedent under which similar suits could be brought in Arab nations, blocking the presentation of the work of Jewish news reporters or filmmakers under the false label "Zionist propaganda"?

Free speech is a two-way street.

"The French approach would lead to a lowest common denominator world where the most restrictive rules of any country would govern all speech on the Internet," warns Alan Davidson, staff counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. "What happens when the government of China decides to prosecute a human rights group in the U.S. for publishing dissident materials that are legal here but illegal there?"

Not that this all doesn't figure -- in a way -- once we consider the source. Unable to stand foreign competition, the French have long barred the import of foreign cheeses, are nearly unique in setting up a quasi-government agency to discourage people from adopting better foreign words, and have even been known to set quotas requiring theater owner to show almost as many execrable local products (Claude Berri and Emmanuelle Beart always excepted) as they do American films ... usually on the bottom half of a double bill, so everyone can go home.

A U.S. court could still decide to help the French enforce their silly ruling. Here's hoping they find no takers. Instead, perhaps we should take this opportunity to send them a whole bunch of little replicas of that big statue in New York harbor. What's it called?


Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224.


Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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