CNET: New turn in Yahoo tussle over Nazi items

A U.S. appeals court ruled that a lower court was wrong to afford Yahoo protection against a French ruling that ordered it to disallow listing Nazi mementos for sale. The French ruling specified that Yahoo had to take such items down from all of its servers, even the ones in the U.S. A Santa Clara court said the ruling could not be enforced due to free speech concerns, among other legal issues. This new ruling states that the Santa Clara court should not have heard the case because the French government had not yet attempted to enforce its ruling.

The appeals verdict suggests that foreign rulings on e-commerce issues will be much harder to deal with than expected, as companies will not be afforded the opportunity to create predictability by bringing important legal conflicts between jurisdictions to court.