The appeal court of Zurich (Obergericht) recently published an interesting ruling about hyperlinks. Linking to an anti-racism page which contains links to hate sites does not breach Swiss anti-racism law. A former professor of computer science was accused of racism by setting a link to the site www.stop-the-hate.org. Both in first instance in 2000 and in this appeal he was fully acquitted on all charges.

This American-based website is online since 1992 and contains annotated hyperlinks to hate sites. The public prosecutor argued that the former professor had made the content of the site his own. To prove this, the prosecutor launched the remarkable theory that the web should be seen as a book, because of the 'forward' and 'back' buttons in browsers melting linked sites in unity.

The Swiss Internet User Group "finds the behaviour and the substantiation of the public prosecutor incomprehensible. All the more SIUG welcomes the rulings in first instance and from the appeal court, that both state that creating a link on a website does not automatically lead to identification with the contents.

Earlier this summer, the highest, Federal Court in Switzerland ruled that selling instructions on how to build viruses is illegal. According to the courts ruling, it's illegal to publish even partial instructions on how to build programs that harm data.

The case began in the spring of 1996, when a 33-year old man closed a license agreement with an American group to distribute the American version of a CD-ROM in Europe and consequently offered the CD for sale online. The disk did not contain an executable virus-program, but instructions and references to software that might infect or disrupt data or make them useless.

After a long legal procedure, the Federal Court confirmed an earlier judgement of the appeal court of Zurich, condemning the man to 2 months prison sentence and a fine of 5.000 Swiss franks (3.227 Euro).

SIUG press release 'Links auf Webseiten nicht strafbar' (30.09.2003)
https://your.trash.net/pipermail/siug-announce/2003-October/000087.htm...

Bedingt Gefängnis für gewerbsmässige Datenbeschädigung (10.09.2003)
http://www.nzz.ch/2003/09/10/il/page-newzzDKF3EE2Q-12.html

Ruling in CD-ROM case (06.08.2003)
http://wwwsrv.bger.ch/cgi-bin/AZA/JumpCGI?id=06.08.2003_6S.499/2002

(With the kind help of Felix Rauch, SIUG)