Re: Judgement in the SouthWest case.

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> 
> I am not a lawyer, and know little about american law. But I was surprised by
> the assertion that there is no evidence that WCAG is accepted widely - it is
> acknowledged in various US state jurisdictions as well as European, and
> Australian one, is accepted as a policy reference in Canada, ...
> 
> (I am not sure what the comment about "the document is over three years old
> means. Is that meant to imply that it is too old to be useful in interpreting
> a 12-year-old law, or that they expect it to change? I would need to read the
> judgement to understand better.)

I ain't a lawyar also, but I follow a lot (if not almost all) of the
cases
related to the internet in Europe (mostly in the Netherlands).

Most (if not all) of the judgements that denied the fictem, are based on
strange and faulty assumptions. One of most weird, was a case againt a
company sending huge amounts of spam. The claim to forbit the company to
do this on the network of the ISP, was denied because the
telecommunication
law contains that is is illigal to use "an system that sends large
ammounts
of messages, that doesn't require human intervention". The Judge ruled
that
i was in the telecomunication law, and thus only applicable for
telephone
calls, and not an private network. It was only a few weeks later that
the
new European telecommunication laws were agreed on, and it specificly
includes email as such a system. The most strange is that the judge even
also referred to this new law to be in a few other sections.

Sometimes it seems that the judges try to grasp for anything that they
could
use to not honor a request, in any case involving matter they are not
completely familiar with.

> What can be done in the US to give more legal teeth to people trying to
> enforce a right to accesssibility is something I leave to the good citizens
> of the US to decide for themselves - interfering in other countries'
> self-determination isn't really my bag, however often I might give my
> opinions...
> 
> But I am curious about whether a judge making an error of fact is grounds for
> appealing an appeal. Maybe I will ask a lawyer's opinion to satisfy my own
> curiosity.

I can come up whit quite a couple of companies I would like to sue
personally,
but I haven't yet, because I find little solid *court proven* ground
under
my feet yet. If I had this solid ground I would most probably be sueing.

Christian.

Received on Tuesday, 22 October 2002 04:07:50 UTC