The collective blockade of a corporate website in the context of a political event is not violence or coercion but legitimate free expression, a German Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt decided on 22 May.

The decision came almost five years after the online demonstration took place. The groups "Libertad" and "Kein Mensch ist illegal" (No Human is Illegal) had called for an online blockade of Lufthansa's website to protest against the company's participation in the deportation of asylum-seekers. With a script- (client-) based distributed denial of service attack, the Lufthansa web servers were supposed to be blocked during the annual company's shareholders assembly on 20 June 2001. Though Lufthansa was mostly able to adapt to the protest by renting more bandwidth for that day, the event created significant public interest.

The first-instance court of Hamburg gave its final ruling on the liability of forum comments, stating that moderators of internet forums are liable for content posted on their sites.

Initially, the legislation held forum providers liable for illegal content they had knowledge about and there was no obligation for them to search for such content. This interpretation was now overruled by the Hamburg court who considered providing forums as a business operation. Therefore forum providers should be able to have sufficient staff and means to check out comments on their forums. As the court stated, in case they cannot operate accordingly, “they either have to expand their in-house resources or ... reduce the scope of their business operations,"

The case originating the ruling was that of a forum member of German news

Laila Freivalds, the Swedish Foreign Minister resigned on 21 March after having been cornered by the press on her involvement in the closure on 9 February of a far-right party's website.

The Web site, which was planning to publish caricatures of Muhammad like those that led to deadly protests by Muslims all over the world, was contacted by a top Foreign Ministry official who said it should be closed for security reasons.

Although, in the beginning, the minister denied having known about the official's action and having exerted pressure on the hosting company, a later report from the ministry said she had been involved in the decision.

The minister told the media that the cartoons were "offensive to other peoples' religious beliefs" and admitted to the media that she was concerned

Michael Keith Smith, a former parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party has received £10,000 in damages in a defamation case occurred on the internet

Smith was a participant in a discussion on the Iraq war held on a discussion board run by Yahoo!. Tracy Williams, another participant in the discussion, posted under pseudonym series of defamatory remarks about Smith on an internet bulletin board calling him a "lard brain" a "Nazi", a "racist bigot" and a "nonce". She also alleged that he had sexually harassed a female co-worker.

Although Smith had obtained court orders in June 2004 that allowed him to identify the person behind the remarks, Williams continued the defamatory campaign in 2005. Smith sued her and Judge Alistair MacDuff considered the remarks clearly defamatory and awarded Smith £10,000 damages - £5,000

In a long awaited ruling, the Maritime and Commercial Court in Copenhagen has decided that so-called deep linking is legal in Denmark. The decision is expected to have a major impact on many Danish online-services and search engines.

Controversially, the Maritime and Commercial Court has decided to go against a prior verdict by a lower Danish court. In July 2002, the court ruled that the Danish company Newsbooster was violating copyright law and marketing law by using deep links to articles in Danish online-newspapers. Instead of linking to the main pages of the newspapers, Newsbooster was linking directly to the individual articles, thereby allowing readers to bypass the front pages. The newspapers demanded that the service be shut down - with success.

In the new case, the court has taken the opposite stance. This time, the

Freedom of speech won in a battle that lasted for a decade between Karin Spaink, a Dutch writer and XS4ALL, her Internet service provider, on one side, and the Church of Scientology, on the other side, which was claiming copyright infringement.

It all began in 1995 when the Church of Scientology attempted to seize the servers of the Internet service provider, XS4ALL, for having hosted a web site where some of the Scientology religious documents were published, claiming the infringement of the copyright.

Hearing of the dispute, Spaink posted the same documents to her own site hosted by Xs4all. Later on she stated: "I got into this because I thought it was important to define how copyright issues are settled online and how ISPs should or should not be held accountable," .

In a tight decision (6-5) ruled on 12 January 2006, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed Yahoo's case of sale of Nazi-related books and memorabilia on its French auction site.

The majority stated that "First Amendment harm may not exist at all" and that it's "extremely unlikely" that any penalty could be assessed against Yahoo's U.S. operations. "Unless and until Yahoo changes its policy again, and thereby more clearly violates the French court's orders, it is unclear how much is now actually in dispute,"

The minority considered that "criminal statutes of most nations do not comport with the U.S. Constitution. That does not give judges in this country the unfettered authority to pass critical judgment on their validity,"

The case came as a result of a French court decision against Yahoo by La

In response to the article about the Norwegian Supreme Court decision on hyperlinks in the previous EDRI-gram, subscriber Matthias Spielkamp from Germany pointed to an article he wrote about recent jurisprudence in Germany. Contrasting the Norwegian decision that a hyperlink can not be considered unlawful in a copyright context, irrespective of the legal or illegal nature of the content offered, the appeal court of Munich decided to uphold a ruling that the e-zine Heise had to remove a link to the website Slysoft.com. At the site software was offered to make copies of copy-protected CDs and DVDs.

Spielkamp writes: By providing a link to the company's homepage, the court said, Heise intentionally provided "assistance in the fulfilment of unlawful acts" and is therefore liable as "an aider and abettor". The case