Melissa Wang at AsiaMedia:

Shi Tao, a jailed Chinese reporter and poet, has joined a U.S. lawsuit against Yahoo! Inc. for providing user info to the Chinese government. The suit, filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA in April, claims that Yahoo! provided identifying knowledge of Net users to Chinese authorities which led to the arrest of several Chinese dissidents, including Shi.
Shi, a former writer for the financial publication contemporary Business News and a recipient of that year’s Golden Pen of Freedom Award, was sentenced to ten years in prison by a Chinese court in 2004 for giving state secrets to foreigners via his Yahoo! e mail explanation. He joins dissident Wang Xiaoning, imprisoned in 2003 for subversion, and Wang’s wife in seeking compensation from the California-based Web company for helping in the Chinese government to convict them.Shi’s conviction stemmed from an e-mail that he sent to a pro-democracy group in the United States regarding media restrictions in China. Yahoo! gave Shi’s anonymous Web user ID and the location from where he sent his e-mails to the Chinese government upon desire. Yahoo! maintains that it had to comply with local laws and hand by the data.

“Companies doing business in China must comply with Chinese law or its local employees could be faced with civil and criminal penalties,” Yahoo! said in a statement.

Like it or not, the quality of the actual case against Yahoo will depend on the Terms of Use Yahoo employed in China at the duration of the disgusting decision to turn the info by to the Chinese gang-lord government leaders.