“This case hinges on one crucial question: do Americans’ First Amendment freedoms extend into cyberspace or do foreign governments have the power to censor our online speech?” said Ann Brick, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. “The appeals court decision will be enormously significant in either bolstering or chilling free expression on the Internet.”

The ACLU national office together with the ACLU of Northern California and a broad coalition of rights groups filed their friend-of-the-court brief in Yahoo v. La Ligue Contre le Racisme et L'Antisemitisme, a case that arose when two French groups sued U.S. based Internet portal Yahoo Inc. under a French law that makes it illegal to engage in speech related to Nazism.

In November, 2001, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that the First Amendment prohibits American courts from enforcing the French court’s order requiring Yahoo Inc. to block French users' access to web pages that contain speech related to Nazism.  The ACLU’s brief to the Ninth Circuit argues that Judge Fogel’s decision was correct.  "Under U.S. law it is preferable to permit the non-violent expression of offensive viewpoints rather than impose viewpoint-based governmental regulation upon speech,” wrote Fogel.  “The government and people of France have made a different judgment based upon their own experience."

In the second case, the ACLU is filing a brief in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cleveland. The court has agreed to hear the appeal of a man who was ordered to stop posting critiques of a shopping mall developer on websites he posted with the words "sucks.com" after the developer's name. This is the first so-called "cybergripe" case to reach an appeals court.

"The ACLU has become increasingly concerned about the growing tendency of large corporations and governments to use their powers to suppress legitimate protected speech or intimidate critics in the online context," said Ann Beeson, an ACLU national staff attorney who has litigated numerous online free speech cases.