RE: [ga] 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Reverses Barcelona.com Decision

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Rodrigo Orenday Serrato wrote:

> "When can it be deemed that an Internet site is marketing to the
> citizens of country X?"  That is, what sorts (if any) of
> country-specific actions are required?"
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, practice shows that an Internet site may be
> deemed to market to the citizens of a given country if (i) the
> corresponding website may be accessed from said country

You've made a jump between domain names and web sites - DNS is used for
things beyond the world wide web.  We need to always remember that the web
is but a piece of the net.

I think that mere accessibility is a rather weak foundation on which to
attempt to assert local law over a remote defendant.

The internet brings nothing new to accessibiltiy - entities offering goods
and services have been internationally been accessible at nearly the speed
of light for more than a century via telegraph and telephone.

My sense is that Michael Froomkin's analogy to the pragmatic elements used
to justify jurisdiction are apt elements for judging whether internet
based materials and services are being used in ways that make it
appropriate for a country to exert its power over that use.

> ...(iii) if the website has a version in the official language of said
> country.

I live in California.  Here there are nearly as many speakers of Spanish,
Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Russian... as
there are of English.  I live in Santa Cruz - a name, like many in
California, that is not based on English.

It would be very troublesome if a person here in California were to find
himself/herself subject to Phillipine jurisdiction simply because they put
up a website in Tagalog, or subject to Mexican (or Spanish) jurisdiction 
because they used Spanish.

		--karl--


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