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Out-Law News 1 min. read

Dutch court stops indirect links to banned material


A Dutch court has decided that Indymedia, a collective of anti-corporate media organisations, broke the law by linking to web sites that contained illegal material that was the subject of a lawsuit against Google earlier this year.

In April 2002, Germany’s national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, raised an action in Germany against Google, the search engine company, for including links in search results to web pages that provided instructions on how to sabotage railway systems. The pages were contained within a publication called Radikal.

Google removed the links immediately and deleted cached copies of the offending pages. Deutsche Bahn subsequently won a court order against a Dutch ISP that hosted the articles.

On 23rd April, the Dutch arm of Indymedia received notice from Deutsche Bahn to remove links to mirror sites which linked to the offensive material. Indymedia refused to comply and the case went to the Dutch courts.

The company claimed that by linking to mirrors, it was not linking directly to illegal material. However, the court ruled that Indymedia’s practices broke the law.

Indymedia said in a statement:

"The verdict is surprising, since Indymedia NL does not link directly to illegal articles. Until now, only direct links to illegal material were forbidden in the Netherlands. Out of this verdict however, it follows that indirect links to illegal material are also forbidden, because Indymedia NL´s links only point to copies of the front page of the German periodical Radikal. It takes more clicks to reach the illegal articles."

"Indymedia NL considers the ruling a dramatic limitation of the possibilities of the internet and the freedom of speech. Indymedia NL will probably try to appeal this decision out of principal considerations."

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