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Comment by bartart | Hacker News Reader

This is good for the EFF in the short term, but what if the Australian court finds that the EFF is ignoring its order and so must pay fines?

Perhaps in response to US court saying "the Australian court lacked jurisdiction over EFF", the Australian court will say that the US court has no jurisdiction in Australia. The Australian court could conceivably force the EFF to change how its site is shown to people in Australia. Then after realizing that people in Australia can still access the US version of the EFF's site, force the EFF to change its site in all countries.

This sort of problem could become more common, such as the case that Google lost where the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Google had to remove results in violation of Canadian law from all Google results worldwide.

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countries' laws only apply within its borders. An Australian court cannot fine the EFF or force them to modify their website because it does not operate within Australia, they have no ability to "force" the EEF to do anything. Google only had to obey the Canadian Court because it has operates in Canada [0]

[0]: https://www.google.ca/about/locations/?region=north-america

Could they obtain an injunction forcing Australian ISPs to block the EFF website?

Possibly, although that depends on Australian law, may be impractical, and will be of limited effectiveness.

They can censor EFF's website against Australians. There's a Internet censorship scheme available to courts.

Countries laws apply wherever they say they do. Whether they are able to enforce them is a secondary issue.

Some countries do claim jurisdiction outside their own borders for certain types of cases.

Generally only for their own citizens. This covers, for instance, cases of sex tourism.

The German criminal law explicitly covers e.g. all cases of money counterfeiting, human trafficking, and war crimes worldwide regardless of nationality. They have given themselves some binding restrictions on what cases should be prosecuted. Of course enforcement is usually hard to impossible so it does not get used often. But just as an example, a German court has sentenced an Rwandan FDLR president for assisting war crimes even though there is absolutely no connection to Germany.

Germany is not alone in claiming universal jurisdiction for certain crimes.

The EU GDPR regulation applies to people interacting with citizens of the EU, not only EU citizens.

Law can certainly apply to foreign legal entities as defined by the local legislation if the legal code permits such.

> the Australian court will say that the US court has no jurisdiction in Australia

One would hope that'd be a given and go without saying.

> The Australian court could conceivably force the EFF to change how its site is shown to people in Australia

Not without jurisdiction over the EFF they can't.

> Then after realizing that people in Australia can still access the US version of the EFF's site, force the EFF to change its site in all countries.

Not without jurisdiction over the EFF they can't.

It just seems like the US court decided that the Australian court had no jurisdiction over the EFF. But does the Australian court agree with the US court's ruling? It may or it may not. Evidently the Australian court at one point believed it had jurisdiction because it took up the case in the first place and issued a ruling. To me just as an observer it seems that the Australian court gets to decide what is under its jurisdiction.

> it seems that the Australian court gets to decide what is under its jurisdiction.

Nope

To have jurisdiction over something, you need to have enforcement power there. The Australian court can make any claims they like, fine EFF, even charge its officers with contempt of court - but I don't see how this could possibly be enforced.

Couldn’t they just tell Australien ISP to block their IPs?

Sure. But that's enforcement against the ISPs, not EFF itself.

EFF officers won't be able to vacation in Australia.

Unless the EFF site is hosted in Australia, such a ruling cannot have any effect. A court could force Australian ISPs to block eff.org though. Interesting things could also happen if the EFF used an Australian DNS provider, but that is quite unlikely.

It gets blocked at the ISP level. Nothing to do with DNS providers.

EFF Australia should just repost the EFF US post and see what happens. :)

The post didn’t make clear if EFF US contested the case in South Australia at all. In which case it was probably a default judgement and unlikely based on merit?

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