European Arrest Warrant and publishing/distributing on the internet

[Bettina Jodda (Twister)]

Morning from Germany :-)

> ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk writes:
> [snip]
>
> >Zimbabwe's govt is claiming that Web pages accessible in that country are
> >"published" there,
>
> [snip]
>
> >Hopefully (!) the UK would not go down this route...
>
> You must be joking. The internet is *global* but the governments of the
> world have not fully realised this yet. Give it another decade or so. In
> the meantime what you will see is more of what we already have: each
> government passes its own laws about the internet without regard to the
> fact that it is global. Britain will not be any different.

Some remarks from Germany about that.

1. We had a case with someone called "Torben", a right-wing extremist to say 
the least :-) who was chief of the so-called "Adelaide-Institute".
On his web-site, hosted in Australia, he denied that the Holocaust had been 
happening. (to deny this is forbidden by law in Germany).
Though the web-site was hosted in Australia where "it is allowed to deny the 
Holocaust", Torben was treated according the German right as the web-site was
a) addressed to German people by using German language
b) "disturbing the public order in Germany" as the effect of a web-site like 
his one does also take place in Germany.

For those who are interested, just look for the Telepolis-articles about 
"Torben and the Holocaust" (I am too lazy to do so)

2. When you realize that there are laws which are saying "a" in one country 
and "never a" in another, there are huge problems coming up.

If you compare this to the offline-world, it would be a problem to decide on 
which side to drive in the UK --- if you drive on the left side, you are not 
acting in accordance with German law, if you are driving on the right side, 
you are not acting in accordance with UK law.

3. how can you be sure that your website is according to any European law
(hence that Turkey is to be accepted as EU-member probably and that in Turkey 
you have to send the text of your website printed out to the authorities to 
get the allowance to put your website online) --- not even lawyers do know

4. In Denmark a court-decision has recently said that "deep-linking" is not 
according with the law - the reason was that the particular site offered a 
service for money: their crawlers searched the web for interesting news, 
gathered them on their site and so you could go to the articles directly 
without going to the first page :-)
So what about a similiar law in Germany and the UK? None-existent.
So will a service like that be forbidden or not?

The idea of making local laws for the internet is stupid in my opinion but it 
will definitely bring a lot of trouble for the users.


I hope this was legible - if not, sorry for the English

Twister