German Court Acquits Leftist Politician

A court acquitted a left-wing German politician Monday who had been charged with aiding and supporting guerrilla acts with information linked to her home page on the Internet.

The court ruled that Angela Marquardt, 25, a former deputy leader of Germany’s reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism, could not be held responsible for the contents of a magazine Germans could access via a “hyperlink” on her home page.

It ruled that she had made the magazine accessible before its June 1996 publication of instructions for antinuclear activists on how to sabotage railway lines. The court said she could not be punished for merely maintaining the hyperlink.

A hyperlink is a section of highlighted text on a page that can be viewed on the World Wide Web, the popular graphical part of the Internet computer network.

By clicking on the hyperlink with a computer mouse, the user is given immediate access to another computer where the linked page has been stored.

The decision is fresh evidence of a new trend in the short history of Internet regulation that seems to reflect the view that liability for illegal material should rest with the author, not other users who link to the documents or the network operators who provide access to the Internet.

Early attempts to impose stricter controls on freedom of expression over the Internet are also being overturned, as shown by last week’s ruling in the United States to overturn the Communications Decency Act, which sought to ban pornography and other material considered indecent by the bill’s authors.

The Berlin court said it would be difficult to order users to make constant checks for illegal information on Internet pages made accessible by hyperlink because there is no legal basis for this.