Shi Tao: Yahoo! had another choice to avoid to be evil to be legal
Rebecca MacKinnon, a research Fellow at the Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, focuses the real problem on her blog about the role Yahoo! played on the arrest and conviction of journalist Shi Tao.
Yahoo! declared they had to help Chinese authorities. In an email to Reuters, a spokesperson wrote: "Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based."
But Rebecca MacKinnon claims that yahoo! could avoid the problem: instead of providing an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China (as it actually does), making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction, Yahoo! could have provided a service hosted offshore only. So Shi Tao wouldn't have been legally obligated to hand over his information.
Read this very interesting post on her blog.
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matteo mohorovicich
