Deutsche Bahn to sue Google; Yahoo, AltaVista next up

Deutsche Bahn AG, the German national railway operator, will file suit Wednesday against Google Inc. because the company's search engine provides links to a Web site that offers instructions on how to sabotage railway systems, Deutsche Bahn said Tuesday. Lawsuits against Yahoo Inc. and AltaVista Co. also are being prepared.

Deutsche Bahn recently sent letters to all three U.S. search engine operators asking them to remove the hyperlinks to the online copies of two articles from the German-language left-wing extremist publication, Radikal, which has been outlawed in Germany. The articles detail how to cut power on parts of the railway system.

"We wrote Google and told them that there is illegal content on their pages and that they are linking to pages with illegal content. They have not answered us, so we will file a lawsuit against Google in Germany tomorrow," said Christian Schreyer, head of the legal department for media and competition law at Deutsche Bahn in Berlin.

Google not only offers a hyperlink, but also has the Web pages with the articles in question in cache, allowing a user to view them on the Google Web site, Schreyer noted.

AltaVista and Yahoo have two more days to respond to the letters sent by Deutsche Bahn, while Google's deadline passed on Tuesday, Schreyer said. If there is no response from AltaVista and Yahoo, lawsuits will be filed "later this week or early next week," he said.

The articles, published under the headline "a handbook for destruction of railroad transport of all kinds," are used by groups protesting transport radioactive material, Schreyer said.

"We always have trouble with people sabotaging our system and people were following these instructions," he said.

A spokesman for Google in Mountain View, California, declined to comment, stating that it is company policy not to comment on the legal affairs of the company. A London-based spokeswoman for Yahoo of Sunnyvale, California, also declined to comment citing company policy. A representative of AltaVista in Palo Alto, California, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The announcement of legal action against the U.S. search engine companies comes a day after Deutsche Bahn won a case in the Amsterdam District Court forcing Internet service provider XS4ALL Internet BV of Diemen, Netherlands, to block access to the articles hosted on its servers. Deutsche Bahn wants the search engine links removed. The articles are now inaccessible.

"Even if the pages no longer exist on XS4ALL sites, we want the search engines to remove the link because it still advertises a handbook for destruction. People will start looking for it elsewhere and we don't want that," said Schreyer, adding that Deutsche Bahn will also take action against other sites that host the Radikal articles.

Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

"There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there," Schreyer said.

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