Stardate 20011108.1204 (On Screen): A federal judge in the US
has declared that courts outside of the US do not have the right to try to control what US citizens and companies place on web sites which are hosted within the US, even if they can be accessed from the country of that foreign judge. This is absolutely a correct decision; it was all-or-nothing and if he had decided foreign judges could apply their own laws about content to the US then our online First Amendment rights would have been shredded. If it was France this year, next year it might have been China and the year after that Afghanistan.
But rest assured that no matter what decision a judge makes, someone somewhere will decide he was a fool. (That's why judges get the big bucks.) In this case it's The Register who states that this has opened a massive can of worms because the US judge let "parochial concerns" prevent him from seeing the "wider implications". I'm sorry, I can't agree that the First Amendment is a parochial concern, and the decision was clearly correct precisely because it was based on the wider implication of the possibility of US speech being limited only to that which would be permitted by anyone anywhere in the world. The French have no more right to control free speech by Americans inside the US than do the Taliban. (discussion in progress)
