Yahoo! Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et l'Antisemitisme

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Yahoo! Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et l'antisemitisme (LICRA), 433 F.3d 1199 (9th Cir. 2006),^[1] the Ninth Circuit applied the Calder test to find that a California court could properly establish specific personal jurisdiction in a declaratory judgment action against two French civil rights organizations suing Yahoo! and Yahoo! France over the availability of Nazi content to French users of its services.

Under the threat of substantial financial penalty, the French Court ordered Yahoo! to take "all necessary measures to dissuade and render impossible" access within France to sites displaying Nazi paraphernalia or other anti-Semitic content, and directed Yahoo! France to display an interstitial warning to users in France prior to enabling their access to Yahoo.com. While Yahoo! France substantially complied with the order, Yahoo! resisted French court's efforts to dictate changes to its US-based services. (Although Yahoo! later adopted a policy change addressing many of the French complaints, allegedly for independent reasons.)

In reviewing Yahoo's claim for declaratory relief, the Court applied a three-part version of the Calder test to determine if the effects of LICRA's action were sufficiently directed at California to establish personal jurisdiction, including whether the defendant: 1. committed an intentional act; 2. expressly aimed at the forum state, and 3. causing harm that the defendant knows is likely to be suffered in the forum state. Focusing on the French Court's orders, the Ninth Circuit found that compliance would require Yahoo! to perform significant acts in California as the servers supporting yahoo.com, which would have to be modified for compliance, were located in that state, thus fulfilling the first two prongs of the test. Although the penalties contained within the orders had not been enforced and the companies were in substantial compliance, the court found that the threat of future enforcement and the "very existence" of the orders constituted "harm" under the third requirement of the Effects test.

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