German authorities say they plan no legal action against Yahoo over the online auction of copies of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" book, which is banned in Germany.
A spokesman for state prosecutors in Munich said they had dropped an investigation into whether Yahoo could be charged with incitement to racial hatred because its service had been used for such auctions.
Manfred Wick told Reuters such a charge would imply Yahoo had full knowledge of such auctions and had not done everything in its powers to prevent them. He said this was not the case in the two auctions in question, which took place last year.
Wick said the supplier of the book was assumed to come from "an Anglo-Saxon state," without giving further details. He stressed that distribution of the book, in which Hitler set out much of his political vision before coming to power in 1933, was still an offense in Germany.
Yahoo in January introduced new measures aimed at combating auctions of hate material and other dubious items after a French court in November demanded that residents of France be blocked from access to a Yahoo auction site selling memorabilia.
