Dear people this is an important case for any activist or free speech media. Please read on.

national | miscellaneous | news report

Thursday July 18, 2002 14:10

by no censorship

Dear people this is an important case for any activist or free speech media. Please read on.

Hi,

Dear people this is an important case for any activist or free speech media. Please read on.

story
Until the mid 90's, the German eco-anarchist magazine Radikal was published regularly on the internet. Then the Deutsche Bahn won a court case against the internet provider that published the magazine forbidding them to publish any longer (the magazine contains two articles describing how to sabotage railways that transport nuclear waste). So far not a disaster, the internet is world wide, so the Dutch sister provider xs4all.nl mirrored the magazine until now. In spring this year the DB also won the courtcase against them in the Netherlands and they had to take off the mirror.
Several providers all over the world mirrored the mag. The more concerning developements in this case are that recently DB won a courtcase against Indymedia.nl for publishing links to these mirrors. This is a dangerous precedent in history because the internet is based on hyperlinks.
Also DB has started a courtcase against Google, and they have also contacted! other major searchrobots ordering them to remove links that lead to the articles. They are planning lawsuits against yahoo and altavista if the links aren't removed. Google says they want to arrange this out of court, and they are working to remove the links.
It defenitely looks like they want to push this thru all the way and totally remove this info from the net.

We think this would be a major breach of free speech and press freedom and therefor call all freedom loving people to take action against this, because we fear that if they can pull this off, there will be more companies and governments trying to do the same thing.
Our idea is that if enough mirrors and links exist all over the world, it will become financially impossible for DB to sue everybody, and other companies will be discouraged to do the same.

what you do?

publish the two forbidden articles in your magazine, spread them as widely as possible, before they dissappear.
mirror Radikal and sent us more links to mirrors
make links to the existing mirrors of Radikal
sent donations to indymedia.nl, because they are an independent organisation ran by volunteers, and right now, there is no money to take on this case in a higher court
mail google, yahoo, altavista, etc to convince them of the importance of this case and not to remove the links, but to take this on in court
mail us a good translation of these articles (important)
mail us with proposals for actions or campaigns
resources

www.indymedia.nl
their press release: http://www.indymedia.nl/nl/2002/06/4836.shtml
links to the mirrors can be found on our website: www.anarchisme.tk
in attachment the two forbidden articles
Thank you for reading,

Anarchist Collective Ghent Belgium