COLOGNE (Germany), May 28: Former tennis star Steffi Graf won a legal battle against Microsoft on Tuesday when a German court held the US software giant responsible for users posting fake nude photos of her on its Internet service.

The superior court here upheld a previous ruling in December that photo montages of nude models topped with Graf’s face, posted on Microsoft Network’s German online service, could legally be considered company property.

Links to the photos were found on the Web site of the company’s German unit, and the pages featured Microsoft banner advertising.

Graf, 32, filed suit against Microsoft last year and the company removed the images from its site, but it never publicly accepted responsibility for what the former tennis champion said was a personal embarrassment.

German Internet industry representatives, who say online service providers should not be held legally responsible for the content posted by their users, condemned the ruling.

In a spectacular case four years ago, a German court handed the head of Internet provider CompuServe’s German operations a two-year suspended jail term on charges he distributed child pornography posted by others on the Web.

The case was overturned in November 1999 when an appellate court ruled it was not possible for Internet service providers to fully prevent users from publishing such images.—AFP