India courts dismiss Yahoo, Microsoft lawsuits

Two Indian courts have struck Yahoo and Microsoft off a list of 22 Web companies that were hit with a lawsuit for hosting objectionable content on their Web sites, according to local reports.

Last Friday, the Delhi High Court exempted Yahoo from the legal proceedings as the judge ruled that the lower court had wrongly issued process against Yahoo without evidence, reported the Times of India.

Yahoo India said in the report that the complaint and the order of the magistrate dealt with alleged objectionable material retrieved from various Web sites including Zombie, Orkut, Youtube, Facebook and Blogspot, and none of them pertained to Yahoo.

Last Thursday, Microsoft India also had its lawsuit dismissed. The Economic Times reported then that a judge from a Delhi trial court ruled that the company should not be listed among the social networking Web sites hosting objectionable content as it is involved in the development and sale of software.

"Microsoft India is an odd man out in the array of parties," the judge said. In his order, he noted that none of the documents presented had been downloaded from or stated to have been available on Microsoft's Web site, according to Economic Times.

The complainant Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi was fined 5,000 rupees (US$101) for involving Microsoft in his complaint, the report noted.