Re: DEC vs AltaVista

On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Jeremy G Byrne <jeremy[_at_]midnight.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 29/05/97, David Post <postd[_at_]erols.com> wrote:
> >
> > the difficult issue of whether "any Web activity, by anyone, absent
> > commercial use, absent advertising and solicitation of both advertising
> > and sales, absent a contract and sales and other contacts with the
> > forum state, and absent the potentially foreseeable harm of trademark
> > infringement, would be sufficient to permit the assertion of
> > jurisdiction over a foreign defendant."
>
> What provisions could _possibly_ exist to exert jurisdiction over a
> "foreign defendant" hosting a site from a county outside the Berne
> Convention, WTO etc. (such as Iran, Ethopia, the Cook Islands or
> San Marino)?

In U.S. jurisdiction jurisprudence, "foreign" refers to someone or something outside of the state exercising jurisdiction. If someone sues, say, IBM, in California, IBM, being a non-California corporation, is considered a foreign defendant.

Although the term includes defendants outside the U.S. territory, it is more likely that the judge in this case meant that AltaVista as a (presumably) California corporation, was a foreign defendant in the Massachusetts action.

I note that jurisdiction can and often is asserted over corporations outside of the U.S. One of the major U.S. cases on jurisdiction, Asahi v. Superior Court, involved the question of jurisdiction over a Japanese corporation. If my memory is correct, in that particular case, no jurisdiction was found. However, this wasn't because the defendant was extraterritorial; rather, because in the particular case, the defendant had not had the minimum contacts required for the exercise of such jurisdiction to be consistent with the Constitution's Due Process clauses.

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Terry Carroll       | "The invention provides means for continuously
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