Yahoo! chief defies French ruling

Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, intends to defy a French court order that sought to prevent his company from selling Nazi memoribilia to French citizens on an auction site.

Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez accused Yahoo! of "offending the collective memory of the country" by allowing the English-language site to host the auction of Nazi and Ku-Klux Klan objects. It is illegal to sell racist material in France.

But Yang told French newspaper, Liberation, that he won't change a US site because of French objections to it.

"This French court wants to impose a judgement in a jurisdiction within in which it does not have any control," he told Liberation. "To ask us to filter the access to our content according to the nationality of the Net surfers is very naive."

He added: "Our company is present in 23 countries and everywhere we respect local laws, even in China or Singapore where the governments impose restrictions on the content. In China we even respect censorship because of the political situation."

Yang concluded that the only thing that would make him change his mind is an injunction from a US court.