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| Chilling Effects Clearinghouse > International > Frequently Asked Questions | Location: https://www.chillingeffects.org/international/faq.cgi |
You may have noticed that Chilling Effects has recently begun posting international C&Ds: complaints from people outside the United States to U.S. individuals or companies raising arguments under non-U.S. law. These C&Ds raise some distinct issues from U.S.-based complaints, including jurisdiction, substantive law, and language. They also raise similar issues of transparency for the web hosts and search engines who receive them. Chilling Effects has begun to receive these international complaints from Google, which at times removes results from Google localized searches (e.g., searches on google.fr or google.de instead of google.com).
Because part of our mission is to help the public understand the factors that can contribute to the unavailability or inaccessibility of online information, we have been posting the international notices we receive. At the same time, because the Chilling Effects team consists of U.S. lawyers, faculty, and law students, we do not yet offer annotations to the notices asserting non-U.S. law.
A few general notes: As with the U.S. C&Ds, Chilling Effects posting does not imply a judgment about the notice's legal validity, applicability, or indicate whether the notice was acted upon.
The varying substantive law of different countries means postings legal in one country might be unlawful in another. For example, French law outlaws public exhibition of Nazi symbols; U.S. law would protect that speech under the First Amendment. Jurisdiction, where and under what laws a person can be sued, matters too. Just because a website is accessible anywhere doesn't mean its proprietor can be sued anywhere. A U.S. company with no assets or business contacts abroad doesn't generally need to worry about non-U.S. law. Jurisdiction questions get murkier when a company has contacts or assets abroad -- Yahoo! sued a French group who had won an order from a French prohibiting Yahoo! from allowing French citizens access to Nazi memorabilia, (Yahoo v. LICRA). That case is still pending for en banc review in the 9th Circuit.
If you too want to contribute to the transparency of notice-and-takedown procedures around the world, please submit your C&Ds to Chilling Effects. If you are a lawyer or legal academic ouside the U.S. who would like to participate in the Clearinghouse project, please let us know.
Question: Does this information apply in other countries too?
Answer: Chilling Effects is a United States organization and information on this website is based on U.S. law. Other countries' laws differ, often significantly, so you should not assume that the analyses presented here apply outside the United States. If you have further questions about non-U.S. law, we recommend contacting a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
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Question: What is jurisdiction?
Answer: Jurisdiction refers generally to the authorities who have legal power over you, or, where you could be sued. As a general matter, you can only be subject to the laws of the place where you are present or doing business. Mere publishing of a website, although it may be readable everywhere, does not make you subject to every state and country's law, but if your site offers business transactions with residents of a given state, you may be held to have "purposely availed" yourself of its laws and thus consented to its jurisdiction.
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