Hate material or historical relics, Yahoo can8217;t decide

And no one is more aware of the differing views than Yahoo itself, which says the dispute tests not just the limits of free speech and good taste, but also the boundaries of technology.

The company on Monday was ordered, in effect, to come up with a way to block the material from countries where it is outlawed, while continuing to make it available in places, like the United States, where it is perfectly legal even if it is not to everyone8217;s liking.

A French judge ordered Yahoo to keep residents of France off the parts of its site that sell Nazi memorabilia. Before anti-hate groups were able to claim victory, however, Yahoo indicated it is likely to fight the ruling.

8220;This is a precedent for a completely unworkable system,8221; said Greg Wrenn, associate general counsel for Yahoo, who also cautioned that he was still working his way through the translation of the 20-page French ruling. 8220;Just because you put up a Web site, are you responsible for all the laws of all the countries in the world, and not just the ones you are targeting?8221;

One reason the matter has been so vigorously contested is that Yahoo already has a French site, which abides by local laws and bans auctions of all Nazi material.

Yahoo also has a clear policy against hate-related items and enforces a ban in all countries on items deemed to be advocating the use of violence. However, it doesn8217;t believe that historical items like Nazi flags or battle medals fall into that category.

What the French court addressed were those people in France who go directly to the Yahoo U S site to bid on such historical material that is banned in their country. It is a classic example of how laws written for a physical world do not always translate to a borderless Internet.

Several Internet companies with international audiences have encountered similar problems. Amazon.com news 8211; web sites Inc. NasdaqNM:AMZN 8211; news, for example, originally set out to abide by German law by banning the German-language text of the Hitler manifesto Mein Kampf. But its German customers quickly found a way to skirt the law by buying the English-language version, which was not officially banned. Last fall, that book was one of Amazon8217;s top sellers in Germany. And, to the horror of groups working to suppress hate literature, Amazon8217;s automated book recommendation system kicked in to recommend similar reading material to those who had bought Mein Kampf. 8220;Not only did Amazon ship the book, it followed up with an unsolicited e-mail suggesting the autobiography of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party,8221; says Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles group that monitors hate material and negotiated with Amazon to change its policy.

The company later stopped shipping English-language copies of the book to Germany as well.

8220;When I finally spoke to Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, he conceded they shouldn8217;t be knocking on the doors of people in Germany and peddling hate,8221; said Cooper.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has increaingly focused its efforts on online material, has had less luck with Yahoo and some other auction sites like eBay Inc. NasdaqNM:EBAY 8211; news that have large international audiences.

While these sites typically cite the need to respect free speech laws, as well as daunting technological challenges in tailoring their Web pages for all the different countries in the world, groups like Simon Wiesenthal say there is a bigger issue at hand.8220;Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven and plenty of companies on the Internet have the right to sell this material, but they8217;ve decided they don8217;t want to,8221; said Rabbi Cooper. 8220;While Yahoo has done a very eloquent job of talking about the right to freedom of expression, it is fighting the wrong battle.8221;

But Yahoo8217;s Wrenn maintained, 8220;We8217;re not like Wal-Mart. We are not endorsing or selecting the products we sell. We do our best to operate within the laws, but we are not trying to decide what people can and can8217;t do.8221;