Yahoo wins ruling in China censorship case

Yahoo Hong Kong has been cleared of any liability for sharing a journalist's e-mail account with the Chinese government in an investigation that landed the person in jail, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Hong Kong's privacy commission said there was "insufficient evidence" to hold Yahoo Hong Kong liable under the local privacy regulations. The ruling can be appealed.

Yahoo and Google have been criticized for cooperating with officials in China on Internet censorship efforts. But Yahoo has been singled out for providing information that helped officials convict Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

The chairman of Hong Kong's Democratic Party, Albert Ho, filed a complaint with the commission in Hong Kong, hoping that the Chinese territory would apply its Western-style laws to hold Yahoo accountable, the report says.

"In 2004, Mr. Shi had emailed information about media restrictions China was going to impose for the 15th anniversary of the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square," the report says. Shi was convicted of leaking state secrets and is serving a 10-year sentence. "The incident raised a storm of protest against Yahoo Inc. and its business practices in China that reached its peak during U.S. congressional hearings in February 2006, in which Yahoo, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. gave testimony about information-sharing and other practices in China," the article says.

Yahoo's mistake was locating servers on mainland China, according to Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor of journalism at Hong Kong University, told the newspaper.

Yahoo shareholders will be voting at their annual meeting in June on a proposal by a pension fund to force the company to refuse Internet censorship requests by governments. The same proposal will be considered at the Google shareholders meeting.

Yahoo China used to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo Hong Kong, but now the operations are under Alibaba.com, which is 40 percent owned by Yahoo.