This litigation inevitably raises substantial issues of local and international jurisdiction. Since June 1996, time after time, the courts in the USA have had to rule on their jurisdiction to hear in one state on-line activity which was prima facie performed in another state. An Internet surfer from Israel enters the site of a French company, which is located on a server in Finland and orders goods or a service. The Finnish server transmits the data to the company's branch in the USA, which sends an order confirmation to the Israeli customer's electronic mail box. Situations like this are already a matter of course on the Internet.
Someone puts on a computer in the USA a page in Hebrew which is defamatory to an Israeli resident.
This is not merely hypothetical. Recently the President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Judge Aharon Barak, was defamed on a server which was apparently not located in Israel. If the particular defamer is an Israel resident, there is no problem. The Israeli Civil Procedure Rules provide that he can be sued in the court where he lives. As we shall see later in this series of articles, the answer to the question is not as obvious as might have been thought.