ontacts” merely by routinely accessing a server in San Francisco, this rule seems overly broad. However, courts have differed whether to find jurisdiction in the virtual context. For example, in CompuServe, Inc. v. Patterson, the court held that a Texas programmer who wrote programs for use by CompuServe and uploaded them to CompuServe’s site in Ohio was subject to jurisdiction in Ohio. 89 F.3d 1257, 6th Cir. (Ohio), Jul 22, 1996. In Inset Systems v. Instruction Set, Inc., the court held that a company which advertised on the Internet and whose site was accessed from within Connecticut was subject to jurisdiction in Connecticut. 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7160, 1996 WL 498411. Conversely, in Bensusan Restaurant Corp. v. King, the court found that website advertising viewed by New York residents did not establish jurisdiction over a trademark action in New York. 937 F.Supp. 295, S.D.N.Y., Sep 09, 1996. This uncertainty has caused great unrest in the legal and academic communities, both domestically and internationally. Collateral to the issue of jurisdiction over disputes arising in cyberspace is the problem of conflict of laws. For instance, what if an Italian company infringes a British trademark on a server in Venezuela? Even assuming one can settle the jurisdictional quandary, the problem of which laws to apply becomes extremely relevant when the outcome of the dispute entirely depended on which laws govern. For example, in 1998 a German court found that a German executive of the U.S.-based CompuServe was liable for pornography stored on a CompuServe computer in Germany. [NOTE 1]. This was despite the fact that Germany had passed a law in 1997 exempting Internet Service Providers from liability for content stored or transmitted through their servers, and despite the fact that both the prosecution and the defense urged acquittal. [NOTE 2]. Yet the German judge ignored all this and attempted to apply U.S. law. Although the decis...
