That's absolutely insane. But surely not many countries would follow Italy's line in this case?, eventhough it's well documented that some countries have a far more strict policy than others re. censorship. Hopefully the challenge will be successful, and this will be an isolated case.
by the way, they were given 6 months suspended jail sentences:
I have some italian friends, and they've told me about this censorship also. Berlusconi doesn't even try to hide it apparently. One has to ask how someone like this can get elected - I suppose the answer is that he controls the media!! Italians, you have my sympathy...
The idea is that a tight control on free media would ease the control of public opinion by the media he controls.
Beside the war with the judiciary, he controls directly the three main generalist TV channels and, indirectly, the three channels of public TV.
The less "video" are on air, the best for his control.
Beware, it's a political idea and, in Italy, it's matter of serious discussion. I'm just explaining for a "non Italian" audience independently from the fact that I endorse or not the idea.
My opinion is that this government is generically hostile to the free information and to the fact that there is something out of control, there is no need for "special" theories... the plain, old, obscurantism is more than enough.
btw: in this country is forbidden to have WiFi hotspots without having control on who have access to the Internet. Whoever have an open WiFi AP is considered an ISP so he must have many months nogs and so on... Scary, I know...
I think the OP's point is not without some sense: Berlusconi is always criticizing the judiciary, and frankly, in this case I'd criticize the judiciary too, so perhaps it even lends a bit of weight to his argument. Well, I don't really think so, as I think he's up to his hair implants in corrupt schemes, but still, it bears considering.
Spend the next 20-30 years of your life trying to change the way institutions do things and going up against people who want to keep the status quo because it keeps them in power.
Or
Spend a few months preparing to move to another country that matches your values.
Right until your new chosen country does the same. If everyone does as you are suggesting, pretty soon you will run out of options and every nation will be the same.
Last time I was thinking about it, I got to a more optimistic solution... but time will verify what is true. A couple of ideas: If someone moves around, he/she's probably more capable of adaptation than many others. He/she's probably also more intelligent than an average Joe. They're also less likely to have a family and probably around the age where they might want one. So it's quite probable, that it's really a migration of talent. This talent positively influences the destination country (as do the taxes you pay there)... In the end - one might hope that by migrating, you're not only helping themselves, but voting with their actions and supporting the laws they accept...
No, what would happen if everyone did that is that a lot of people will say "oh, <insert country here> is doing a really good job at maintaining freedom", and so a bunch of freedom nuts move there and (we're assuming everyone does it, remember) that'll be a large- and passionate-enough niche (they're passionate enough to move for better freedom, remember) that they'll have influence over the government and be able to keep it from happening.
Also, as much as we hate to admit it because it makes us feel insignificant, "if everyone does it" is not a very good way to make decisions. Unless you have a lot of influence over many, many other people, nobody else is going to do it just because you did it.
Well if you take it to that logical conclusion, you first reach a point where all the freedom-lovers are together in the last free country, with nowhere else to go. That concentration of effort should help matters considerably.
I'm wondering what the Italian authorities hope to gain by this. It's only a matter of time before they suffer a high profile defeat in a higher court, if not in Italy, than in the EU. Are they just trying to buy time, or haven't they thought this through?
Not everything is necessarily centrally planed. Perhaps a naive prosecutor mistakenly pursuing something and trying to save face, perhaps some 'think of the children' indignation, etc. The result however, is to demonstrate how out of touch Italian law is with the Web.
I'm not grandstanding here, Greek law is also flawed, as is US law (e.g. DMCA). It just never ceases to amaze me in how many ways national laws are out of sync with the Web.
Perhaps it's a good thing in the long term though. By these blatantly idiotic conclusions, it is plain for everyone to see that something in the reasoning process is broken.
I don't understand this line of reasoning. How would these convictions stop the web? How will the reversal of these convictions keep the web from being stopped? If it doesn't get reversed at the EU level does this mean that they managed to stop the web? What if a similar conviction happened in Uzbekistan?
To clarify, I think I first need to define globalization. I mean the current world order where the wishes of all of the countries has someone become much greater than any of the individual countries. On defining globalization, I will quote the real rms: "...there are other kinds of globalization, the globalization of cooperation and sharing knowledge". My real definition for globalization is closer to world government, but those two words are not nearly enough to describe the complexity of globalization.
I have a 3 hour lecture on DVD from a powerful Chinese CCP member/academic talking mostly about globalization, I should really digitize it and post the highlights sometime. If anyone wants to see this lecture, email me.
--
The only country where a conviction like this would have been meaningful is in the USA, because Google is from the USA and in some important ways the USA owns the internet. Even if the conviction of the Google executives was upheld at the EU level, it wouldn't do much more than cause Google to open up divestment discussions with Europe, similar to their ongoing discussions with China. Europe is not stupid enough to kick Google out, though China (and by China I mean the rulers of the CCP, not the people of China) probably is that stupid and evil.
By the way, though the Italian court system is clearly very flawed, I do give them credit for being able to hold executives accountable for crimes committed by the corporation.
Truth be told, I'm a bit disappointed with HN comments on this one. Most (and the most voted) are the very predictable "they're so stupid, how can they do that". Maybe they are, but I was really hoping for some discussion on why.
Anyways, AFAIK (and it's not much) Berlusconi right now controls/owns a good majority of media companies. Also there are a fair numbers of scandals involving him which aren't reported by the media outlets he owns. Now if Italy is anything like my native Romania, lately the Internet is becoming both a tool and a media for the political life. And we all know the Internet is harder to control, so efforts by the government in this direction could be expected.
I also think Google is not a chance target. A conviction, even a weak one like this, sends a very strong message to the _local_ companies. If Google couldn't win, who can? And I think the Italian language sites were the target from the beginning. If the conviction stands (and maybe even if it doesn't), this will still have a terrible chilling effect on the news sites there. Now they know that no matter how big or insignificant they are, their owners or operators can find themselves in jail at a prosecutor's whim. Because ways of breaking such laws are not hard to find.
This isn't a issue of italian law. By all accounts, they shouldn't have been prosecuted, never mind being found guilty. Its a issue of freedom on the web.
They'll appeal to EU courts as a next move if they aren't successful in the Italian courts. Some would argue that, morally, issues of information freedom transcend those of the state and practically that Italy cannot go down the path of trying to shut out the information age without hurting themselves badly. Italian law can not change reality.
Agreed - Italy is a sovereign nation with the ability to make and enforce laws. If Google doesn't like it, they can stop doing business there, or suffer the consequences or breaking those laws.
Either way, the "first" world is ripe for a revolution. The internet has opened the eyes of a lot of people to a kind of freedom and self-government that was all but forgotten. Combined with the entitlement bomb that's ticking under the entire system, something will change soon.
I'm not referring to a 70s-style revolution with public executions of the ruling class etc., but I'm predicting some radical changes in the democratic/political system. Transparency, accountability, fewer and simpler laws and significantly smaller government.
I hope what mseebach is predicting happens, but I do think something will eventually end up happening.
Every week it seems I hear of impossible to enforce laws trying to regulate behavior or thought. (just today, trying to make open source using countries suspect, everyone is probably a federal criminal, etc) Trying to fight technology with regulation (drm, dmca, etc). I hear misleading announcements every morning on my commute saying the police have the right to search me without cause. (They can't unless you agree, yet.)
In the past 10 years things like this seem to be escalating and technology seems to have sped it up. Loosely and with a grain of salt; Content filtering and monitoring lead to tor, unjust laws lead to the EFF and ACLU, censorship of news lead to wikileaks, etc.
People will eventually get radicalized, wont they?
Honestly I probably don't know my history very well, maybe this is just SOP for humanity, a constant back and forth.
Just do us a favor, if something does start happening and you do opt out, don't make it harder on the rest of us. ;-)
> People will eventually get radicalized, wont they?
Young people get radicalized. Then they get married, have kids, get a career, get debts, etc. Radicalness over. People eventually sell-out, cop-out, or join up. They rarely stay radicalized.
That is SOP for humanity at least last 80 years or so that I know about.
Then there are the times when otherwise solidly middle class people become radicalised by financial hardship and capricious and unfair actions of government and financial institutions. When the stable productive core of society is getting dislocated from it's niche and starts to see it's relatively moderate level of privilege erode; that is when you get transformational violence across broad sectors of society.
If you want to argue historical examples, both the french revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe followed this pattern.
One of the few useful ideas I read in Utopia stated that (paraphrased) it's nuts to be bound by laws you cannot possibly comprehend within a year.
Makes a lot of sense to me, personally. Though I'll grant that won't happen, it's an ideal to shoot for, instead of endlessly patching problems with laws that noone can possibly comprehend the ramifications of due to the system's complexity.
This is as opposed to the lifetime+ of our current set of laws? I'm not saying a year is a good number, just that it's a better goal to shoot for than we currently have (more laws apparently == better).
What's especially heartbreaking is that most of what's bad about Italy is entirely self-inflicted, and quite possible, if not easy, to fix. Many of the good things about Italy, however, are special, unique, and not at all easily replicated elsewhere.
* A stunning variety of nature, from the snowy Dolomites to the north, to the sandy shores of Sicily, with a bit of everything in between... foggy plains, rolling hills, lakes, rivers forests, beaches, etc...
* Nearly as much cultural variety. I spent last weekend in Meran, which 100 years ago was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and is still mostly German speaking, with traditional Tirolean architecture. It's pretty much night-and-day with, say, Sicily, or the almost Greek looking bits of Puglia.
* A truly staggering amount of art and architecture that goes back 3000+ years, from Greek ruins in Sicily to, of course, the Romans, through the middle ages, and so on and so forth. This is really "fractal": you can see Rome and Venice and whatnot, but also see pretty interesting things in the smallest of regional towns.
"Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants -- David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes -- for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation."
is that last part a typo? or is my ignorance of legalese showing?
edit: ah, so apparently they were given a suspended sentence, but absolved of the defamation part.
What is interesting is that large corporations like google are taking on national governments more and more like equals. First it was Google v. China, now Google v. Italy. These are interesting times we live in...
>>They have the same responsibility as Google has on this issue.
No, they don't. Google owned and operated the site that hosted the video; they have the full responsibility for insuring that they abide by Italian law. Guilty as charged.
If it's overturned in the EU court of law, fine - that's the process. Really, I find it quite surprising that there is so much opposition the ruling; the video is horrible, it is disgusting, it is wrong. Bravo for Italy (and China for that matter) for identifying and trying to do something about a serious issue.
What do you even mean by that? I mean, even try to visualize the alternative; that every video, picture, audio clip and piece of text submitted to any website is first vetted by a human being. Any content that that individual cannot get behind will not be published.
Sure, I would like to have material like that magically disappear too, along with the kind of people who would do such a thing. But if we move the level of discourse into the real world rather than la-la land, we have to accept that we can neither use magic, nor vet every piece of content prior to publishing it.
You are free to post obnoxious shit on the internet without it being vetted first, just like you are free to say obnoxious shit without permission from anyone. The consequences come afterwards — and the fault is yours, not the providers of the medium you chose as the vessel for your content.
Freedom of speech ain't pretty. But the alternative is much much worse. This is the only way it can be done.
and the fault is yours, not the providers of the medium you chose as the vessel for your content.
And in the case of free speech, this would mean Italy is doing the equivalent of trying to jail air for not maintaining privacy. Or, perhaps more accurately, they're jailing one who makes air (God and/or plants, take your pick) for not making air shut certain people up before they say something wrong.
It makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Even if there isn't freedom of speech in a location, you don't put the papermakers in jail because someone wrote something mean on it.
Of course, this is exactly the point - some countries are in fact visualizing alternatives to this sort of free-for-all of 'obnoxious shit' being posted and consumed on the Internet. Why has YouTube been blocked at one time or another in dozens of countries? Say what you will but its not all 'censorship'.
Admittedly, enforcement could be expensive and difficult; so, what? It's a cost benefit analysis for the business; either they can survive under the rules they we can't. And here's the rub that Google knows: if YouTube had to survive under these rules of decency and morality, it probably couldn't survive. So they spend all their time and lawyers fighting any efforts that promote decency and morality.
Someone wondered why I'm posting this point of view while reading this blog, with a new account; it is because I recently had an experience that changed my thinking. I have a 7 year old son that enjoys YouTube, particularly Star Wars videos. A few days ago he was searching for something star wars related and one of the previews that came up has a Brazillian girl giving someone a blowjob - this is on YouTube. Of course, I find this offensive; you cannot allow 7-year olds to type innocent queries into YouTube and be shown videos of women giving blowjobs. Suddenly, YouTube turned from a fun thing to do to a poision to be controlled.
A word about 'censorship' and 'freedoms' - like Italy, I'm just not buying it. Freedoms on the Internet are exchanged; you may allow YouTube the freedom to stream pornography or violence into every household but then the householders (like myself) have their freedoms restricted by having to contend with these sort of things. And when you have a family-oriented culture like China or maybe Italy that has some culture to preserve and they say 'you're guilty of a crime in this country because you violated our moral or ethical values' then in my opinion you must respect their decision, much more so than a huge corporation solely out to make money. I have been in IT for 16 years and I am simply flattened by individuals who use these technologies every day, and fail to see, acknowledge, or support any sort of curbing of these items when it impacts other important, indeed almost fundamental, values that allow society to operate at all.
Most subjects we can disagree with each other, and up vote for a well written comment, but for some reason this comment strikes me as really odd. I find it really hard to believe someone, the kind of person who would be attracted to "hacker news" would have this view point. The 1 hour old account, is also suspicious.
What I really like about Hacker News is that it's overwhelmingly made up people cleverly disagreeing - so that plants/idiots/jokers are generally more obvious.
I'm not sure what the law is called (something about electronic bulletin boards if memory serves me right), but the gist of it is to protect website owners from this very thing; having to vet every content uploaded by individual users.
It was originally meant to protect providers of online bulletin boards, as this was some time before the Web 2.0 kind of user information sharing exploded.
It's not "freedom to laugh at retards" that's the issue. No one is arguing that Google should have been able to keep the video up (not that there isn't some merit to that argument), just that as long as Google complies with police requests in a timely matter, the company and its employees should not be liable for someone else using their service to post content.
It wouldn't surprise me if Google ended commercial activity there for the while (sales offices).
Also, this is certainly bad for david drummond. Having a conviction like this as a lawyer surely must hurt your standing with the bar association in CA.
> Having a conviction like this as a lawyer surely must hurt your standing with the bar association in CA.
I highly doubt the bar association in CA would not be able to make up their mind for themselves and see a politically motivated judgement when they see one.
I don't actually see why Google even bothered opening office in Italy. Italy is part of the EU so they could easily use their Ireland office for invoicing and everything else inside the EU.
Just as I don't think they have official offices in each US state they don't need to have offices in each EU state.
They are just looking for trouble given the peculiarities of each state which includes law and tax system but also gray stuff like corruption, political pressure, etc.
This reminds me when there was a site in Greece which was some sort of blog aggregator for many other blogs. This site got in trouble (and closed, its owner prosecuted, etc) when some other blog posted negative stuff about a public person and that person decided to sue the aggregator.
I don't understand why Google was not able to remove the video - which was one of the most seen on the site - in time (means within few days instead of 2 months).
How long would it have taken until such content had been removed at Hacker News? I guess not more than 30 minutes. Two months = #fail. A simple flag-feature would probably already do it... I hope Google draws the right conclusion from this failure.
That's just complete bullcrap. One of the reasons the DMCA exists in the US is to protect companies like Google in exactly this type of situation. Many EU countries have similar laws
According to the timesonline.co.uk article the video was online for a full month before it was removed, and it was a top ranked video under "most entertaining". I don't think this should have gone to trial, but I do think its fair to say that Google should have done more. Does anyone believe they only got one complaint after a month?
I think the likelihood that it was at the top of "most entertaining" for two months is nil. I think the likelihood that it was on the site for 2 months and the last 48 hours it was in the most entertaining section is high. It probably got a total of 20-50 views before that, which may have resulted in 0 complaints given most people would just close the window.
Google is fully responsible - the fact is that they prefer not to police their networks for inoffensive content because that policy ultimately drives traffic and revenue to their company; they should be forced to review videos BEFORE they are published. Shame on them for allowing this filth.
20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. That means 1200 people reviewing 24/7, making sure that the reviewer speaks the language(s) to watch for profanity.
Exactly - it's fairly obvious why Google has made the conscious decision not to do this, it costs a lot of money and their business model suffers. Ok - so they run the risk of breaking national laws and take the consequences when it happens. I'm not sure this is the most ethical or moral business model but it's what they have decided to do.
We can hope. But with China censoring the internet to suit its political gain, and with Australia trying to get Google to censor their searches too, and now this, it seems a lot of the world is following suit.
While this doesn't sound like a good ruling and will presumably be overturned later, I can't say I'm full of sympathy.
There has been an increasing trend in law to rely on blanket "safe harbour" conditions when it comes to on-line activities. Those conditions act as a get out of jail free card for big organisations, and I'm not sure that is healthy. If you set up a service that can host content provided by others, and that service is successful in large part because it enables people to break some law (copyright, privacy, whatever), why should you get a free pass? What you are doing is not then the same as a post office or phone provider, because you are directly profiting and your business model is based in part on illegal activities.
An extension of this idea is that several powerful corporations, Google among them, have been pushing back the boundaries of the law concerning privacy, personal data protection, intellectual property rights, defamation and so on, as hard as they can. I am quite sure that that is not a healthy trend. Services like Google Groups and Google News are based on leeching the work of others. Google Maps and Google Street View have serious privacy concerns, to the extent that both have been partially blocked in several nations either by law or just by large numbers of people turning out to physically block the camera car from entering their village. Google Video/YouTube established themselves based substantially on blatant copyright infringement. And then you get things like the Buzz fiasco a few days ago.
All of this is done from behind a virtual shield where it is almost impossible for anyone who is damaged by such actions to contact Google about it short of filing a court action. The latter is prohibitively expensive in some jurisdictions, notably including the US, in cases where the damage is not a substantial direct financial cost that a court can award back, which basically means the little guy can't stand up to the mighty corporation even in cases where the corporation's behaviour is clearly unethical and/or illegal.
While I would certainly prefer to have robust laws implemented to protect personal privacy and the like, and to see Google forced to comply with those like anyone else, until that happens I half-welcome just about any non-violent effort to check the Powers That Be and make them reconsider whether some of the things they are trying to achieve are a step too far. Legal shenanigans are a game Google likes, and turnabout is fair play.
I'm not downvoting you because I think you make some good points, however, I completely disagree with your characterization of safe harbor.
Safe harbor rules are what makes the internet of today work.
Today, content isn't just generated from large, powerful, corporations... it's generated from us. For example, Hacker News is protected from any liability this comment might have due to safe harbor rules. It's the reason YouTube can exist. It's the reason why blogging services can exist. It's the reason Twitter can exist (you can still argue whether or not it should though... ). The point of safe harbor is to assign the liability for the content to the creator, not the service that publishes it. The company that serves the content is only liable after they've been notified. This is critical for today's internet.
Any company that allows users to post content (messages, comments, videos, anything) must have safe harbor protections to operate. If they didn't, then they would be responsible for any liability for everything, so they'd have to moderate every single comment, every single video, etc... Basically, this would shut down the user-supplied content that rules the modern internet. What we'd be left with is a computerized version of the one-way communications of old-media.
That would be a bad thing.
Also, you're unnecessarily extending safe harbor protections to where they don't exist. For example, Google Maps and privacy. This is Google's content. They created it. They published it. And they are absolutely responsible for making sure that they are compliant with any privacy regulations. This doesn't fall under safe harbor at all.
Sure companies make mistakes with privacy, your example of Google Buzz is a good one. However, don't confuse these issues with safe harbor. In this specific case in Italy, it is safe harbor that is under attack. And that's a bad thing for Italy.
You sound like we need YouTube to publish videos or that we need Blogger to publish a blog. We don't. Well we do, but only because we have asymmetric bandwidth, and no low-power, easy[1] to set up home server. The second we have that is the second these platforms become obsolete. For many reasons, I would very much like that.
About aggregation sites like Hacker News, you do have a strong point, though.
[1] I mean as easy as Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Twitter… Any harder and it won't work.
I agree... :) it would be nice for all of us to be able to "publish" ourselves... but for the most part, even if we did have better low-power home servers and enough bandwidth to serve the content, most people won't be able / willing to set it up. So, I think in general, the mass-public will be stuck with the Bloggers and YouTubes of the world.
We need things like distributed, encrypted backups for your data, and backup MX to receive your mail. These already exist. What's left to do is the automation of the set up.
I don't think most people really need high availability, so UPS and redundant connections sound like overkill. For fail-safe hardware, we just need something "unplug proof". A Beagle Board (with a few GB of Flash and a small battery) is more than enough.
I am aware that such a solution will be a little less convenient than storing everything "in the cloud", no matter how easy it can be. But the cloud has its downsides as well: you hardly have any privacy in the cloud, and they can shut everyone down, for any reason.
With freedom of expression, and your "we don't. Well we do", it's really best to err on the side of too much freedom, even if we get stupid youtube videos and comments along with it.
Perhaps I wasn't clear about one important point: while safe harbour schemes are one example of corporations like Google pushing back the frontiers of what is legal, I did not mean to imply that all such moves rely on the safe harbour principle. It is merely one example. Something like the proposed Google Books settlement would be another. A lack of effective privacy laws is a third.
As for the difficulty of running things without safe harbour provisions, people are quick to assume that there are no or only limited alternatives, and that without the current scheme we would somehow "kill the Internet", but I challenge that assumption, based on the argument that follows.
Firstly, if there's one thing the Internet has managed to do successfully for a long time, it is evolving creative solutions to large scale problems. The Web started as a small network of pages, with only a few carefully chosen links between them. Then we evolved web rings to help people find related content. After that, ever-improving search engines became the dominant way to find material. Today we have link aggregators, status updates/tweets, etc. There is no reason to believe that removing one form of expression would make things worse; on the contrary, if history is anything to go by, it might well catalyse the development of a better replacement.
On which note, I think we are going to move towards "Web 3.0" where user-generated content is balanced with editorial control by real people anyway. Web 2.0 was an interesting experiment, but the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible, the volume of information is overwhelming, and the simple, user-supported voting systems of today are widely abused and not really up to the job. Even the poster child, Wikipedia, now has policies that prevent open contributions to certain articles, internal politics among the volunteer editors about what should be allowed, etc. I think the kind of purely automated content hosting sites with unlimited user generated content are already dead, they just don't know it yet.
Next is a key point that I imagine some here may disagree with: I have never believed in absolute freedom of speech (of the kind where you can say whatever you like with no responsibility for any consequences). Words are very powerful things, and in the Internet era that power is magnified many times over. I believe that people should be held responsible for something they say that is unreasonably damaging to others, whether it be betraying a confidence, starting a malicious rumour, giving misleading "expert" advice in a field such as health or finance... This is just common decency and courtesy, and indeed almost nowhere has really had freedom of speech in law for many years, because of issues like defamation, national security, court-ordered anonymity for victims of certain crimes, etc.
These things have been part of the law in many jurisdictions since long before the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet, there is no such thing as an off-hand comment quickly forgotten. Society needs to adapt to this new reality, appreciating the benefits of giving everyone the power to speak to millions of others, but imposing suitably harsh penalties for those who use that power irresponsibly.
I just don't see how that is compatible with broad measures like absolute freedom of speech or complete safe harbour rules for those republishing material to potentially huge numbers of people. Those are merely convenient blanket laws designed for ease of implementation, not because they reflect the ethical thing to do.
So I'm not convinced that a law that imposed responsibility and as a side-effect made it difficult to run unlimited user-generated content sites would cause the loss of something truly valuable. If you want to write a dozen spam comments on a blog about how hot Hayden looked on Heroes last night, you are welcome to do it on your own personal web site, where your deeply-considered and original thoughts will no doubt receive the attention they deserve. And if you say something unfair in your next blog post that destroys someone's career, you can look forward to a personal letter telling you when to turn up in court and defend that action or be held accountable.
Meanwhile, I don't see the kinds of rules I'm talking about halting the development of the Web, because I think we're going to move toward more editorial control on the big, popular sites for other reasons anyway. And even if you do believe in absolute freedom of speech, you can still publish what you want on your personal web site, you would just have to take personal responsibility for it accordingly instead of hiding semi-anonymously behind some giant organisation who will republish your material but shield you from being identified and thus held responsible for the consequences. I, for one, don't have a problem with that.
Unless you have a peering relationship with a backbone provider, someone is responsible in a safe-harbor sense for any content you put on the internet. Period. That's what the parent post meant in saying that elimination of safe harbour would favor the big players over the small, and the internet would cease to exist as we know it.
This fact is indifferent to whether you use web-rings, NNTP, your own "personal website," or YouTube to post content.
Sure, but there is a difference between a pure communications medium (providing a unique point-to-point connection between identified hosts that temporarily transmits arbitrary data) and a content hosting service (which stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others). Treating an ISP analogously to a mail or telephone service provider is a reasonable comparison. Assuming that a hosting site like YouTube should be treated in the same way by default is a stretch, IMHO.
How about companies like RackSpace which " stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others" - are they safe?
How about your local web hosting company, which " stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others" ?
How about your ISP, running a caching proxy such as Squid which " stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others"?
There are a lot of independent entities out there storing, publishing, and forwarding your content. Most make fractions of a cent on each "piece of data" - photo, video, blog, whatever that flows through their system. They cannot commercially afford to screen it all, or even sample it.
Can you read every single article on the new page of Hacker news? 24/7? How about on Digg?
Throwing up a few random examples doesn't further the debate very effectively. There are obvious differences between, for example, anonymous links in the infrastructure of the Internet and an identified end product hosting site. There are obvious differences between a local web hosting company, which has a specific commercial arrangement with an identified individual, and a generic hosting service that allows arbitrary, effectively anonymous individuals to post arbitrary material.
I'm not saying there should be no provisions in law to support the effective running of the Internet. I've never said that. I'm just saying that companies who want to establish a certain business model on the Internet shouldn't get a free pass just because it is difficult to run a business with that model while still complying with the same laws as everyone else. If that means some companies cannot continue, so be it: as I said before, I don't think anything of significant value will ultimately be lost, and I would rather that than effectively legislate certain businesses above the law just because they can't work out how to do things legally otherwise.
Your final comments are a straw man. Hacker News and Digg aren't republishing those articles, they're just linking to other sites that do.
There are the comments. I wouldn't be trivial to just link to them instead of actually hosting them.
Also, I am not certain this would be a good thing to always require content to have someone be accountable for it. If I want to express, say, a dissenting political opinion, I may want to be anonymous, and I may not want to pass the burden of accountability to someone else.
> If I want to express, say, a dissenting political opinion, I may want to be anonymous, and I may not want to pass the burden of accountability to someone else.
I am certainly not saying that no protected speech should exist. Indeed, I am all in favour of a law that protects certain classes of speech, with political views probably the most important class.
I just think that such laws should be crafted carefully, striking a balance between freedom of expression and protecting people from the harm when others abuse that freedom, and that once such laws have been made, they should apply on the Internet as much as anywhere else.
There are complications with jurisdiction in the on-line world, but there is no reason that most of the international community can't reach a consensus on these issues, just as they have on many others before.
I have always struggled with the idea of anonymity as a vehicle for free speech, for three reasons. Firstly, most people who think they are anonymous on-line really aren't, if someone tries hard enough to identify them, so it is often an illusion. Secondly, actively protecting anonymity automatically removes any responsibility from the speaker, whether or not what they are saying is within a protected area, creating a huge loophole in the laws. Finally, while anonymity may have a perceived value in protecting those opposing an undemocratic government, we don't have that situation anywhere in the west (to the point where political dissidents are routinely threatened or "disappeared"), and if we ever reach that point again, the correct response will be one of the three boxes after "soap".
Wikileaks is, as far as I am concerned, the textbook example of a site that should not exist.
Firstly, if you need Wikileaks in the first place, you have bigger problems.
Secondly, Wikileaks actively tries to place itself above the law. No-one should be above the law.
Thirdly, there is little that has been revealed via Wikileaks that could not have been revealed in the traditional way via a free press. Wikileaks may make things marginally easier, but if you're in the business of leaking private stuff only if it's easy, maybe you should reconsider your world view.
Finally, before anyone comes along and tells me how much good Wikileaks does, consider this: they also released the private membership list of an unpopular political party, causing very serious consequences for many members of that party. Whether or not you agree with their politics, that sort of action is way over the line. What about the anonymity of those party members?
Something like Wikileaks has advantages and disadvantages, the former it being unbiased, unlike the free press, which, at least in my country, is ripe with political affiliation and business interests. And yes, the need for Wikileaks signals bigger problems. What bothers me about the loss of anonymity is the inherent loss of ways to fix those problems, but that may just be the necessary tradeoff for the evolution of the web.
The problem with YouTube and Blogger is that you don't publish on YouTube or Blogger. Google does. This is especially obvious in Blogger, where they have a link on the top of the page to "flag abuse". They have power over these publications, so assuming they should have equivalent responsibilities is reasonable.
If we carry out this reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, platforms like YouTube or Blogger won't last long. It would indeed end the web as we know it. It will not end free speech on the internet, though. Not by a long shot.
Free speech can be achieved through two means: the out of jail
free card, or a way for people to publish themselves.
Self publication is possible: we just need personal web servers, symmetric bandwidth, and the promise that we won't sue any ISP for moving bits (we need that safe harbour). Of course, companies like Google or Facebook prefer the out of jail free card (for many reasons, they prefer your data to be on their servers rather than on your own). I think the people will rather take the self publication route, given the choice.
And what happens when someone tries to search for something on this self-published web? It's gotta be indexed somewhere.
Oops! The search provider indexed it, and is serving it out to the world in the form of results. By duplicating your data without reading it, they're responsible. Jail for them.
Youtube and Blogger are a miniscule step beyond indexing. They're duplicating data you wrote on your computer, and serving it out to the world.
Content hosts cannot logically be responsible for user-submitted content. This leaves two outs: safe harbor, or only commercial content on the internet, so the buck can be passed (note that this is identical to a TOS). Remind me again where free speech fits in there?
edit: as I said in another comment: you don't put the papermakers in jail because someone wrote something mean on it.
You missed the part about control. If they have the power, they should have the responsibility. And maybe the accountability as well.
A publishing platform can choose to be neutral (no power), or it can choose not to be. Of course safe harbour should apply to neutral media. For those that are not, however, I am not so sure. Almost, but not totally.
About the paper makers, you missed another point: anonymity. It should be very easy to reach the actual author of a paper, so this makes no sense to sue the paper maker. If the paper maker published all this stuff anonymously, and can't (or refuse to) disclose the author's name, however, that's a different story.
Which fits in nicely with what Google's done in this. They not only have a notice -> take down system in place, which removed the video within hours, but they even helped in finding the people who were the problem in the first place. They used their control to act responsibly. If they allowed it to stay on the site you could argue they're accountable for it, but its temporary existence is merely due to it being a user-submitted content host.
More-so than many other content-hosts, Google did act responsibly. If anything, Youtube is a medium just like the paper, but Youtube responds more rapidly and identifies criminals using the system uniquely, which is something paper cannot do.
Shall we eliminate all paper? It's easier to draw kiddie-porn on paper and post it up all over than it is to get away with it on Youtube.
Obviously, harboring criminals is different than helping an investigation to find the criminals. But without a takedown notice being ignored, there's no harboring, because there's no effective warrant. And without a legal takedown notice, there's no responsibility to remove anything, because to do otherwise would encourage people to restrict free speech just by complaining loudly.
Papermakers have the same measure of responsibility in this as Google. They can restrict selling paper to anyone until they see and approve the use of it, or stop selling altogether, or they can have a safe-harbor because they're merely creating a medium. If they sold paper to a book company that went on to write something which later got banned, they'd be in exactly the same position as Google, but nobody is saying we should all make paper ourselves, and affix our name and address to all the paper we make (running a server is easy to trace, telling who made paper isn't, so this is needed to level the playing field). And, as nobody can guarantee that that name and address are genuine on the paper, it cannot prevent anonymity, and loses significantly to a web host like Google who can point you to the source of everything they find.
Please, everyone, stop buying paper because people can abuse it. In fact, stop buying water because someone could use it to drown someone else, and the water company isn't doing anything to prevent this.
I hope this was an isolated judge's opinion and not the final decision. Even in America the justice system slips from time-to-time, but that's why there are checks and balances so that decisions like this will have a chance to move up the ladder and hopefully disappear at the higher levels of the justice system.
Don't be dense, Google. What they're telling you is that the right people need to be paid-off or you're going to have more and more problems like this.
Funny thing is that Google is quite capable of opposing a country like Italy. They could simply cut all the traffic - search, documents, emails, g.apps, everything. There are many people depending on G. for work every single day. It's just not a sensible thing to do, financially. But if Italian prosecutors start suing employees of google.it for example - who knows? I would risk saying that Italy is less valuable and more annoying to Google right now, than China ever was...
Yeah, I really hope google comes out throwing some strong punches at Italy after this. The consequences of this ruling will have enormous chilling effects on any social media company operating in Italy. If google was able, eventually, to pass on China as a market based on standing up for its principles then passing on Italy as a market should be a slam dunk.
As long as they go through all the proper channels first. Don't want anyone complaining that they just wanted a press day. Unfortunately, this may take sometime. However, I think it'll be worth it.
I think given this ruling there is a very strong case for Google to block access from Italy to any of its sites that could run afoul of Italian privacy law. That would include blogger, youtube, picasaweb, google docs, google groups, wave, buzz, and possibly even gmail.
P.S. Consider how widely the net from Italy's privacy code reaches. Not just sites to like youtube, vimeo, break, or even flickr, but to just about any site that allows users to post their own content, including comments. By my reading if I were to post the home address of some Italian citizen in this very comment that would be sufficient to make it possible for Paul Graham to be convicted of breach of the privacy law in Italy.
By such criteria the fraction of, say, the top 1,000 most popular web sites that could legally operate in Italy currently without being vulnerable to a legal problem of that sort is probably fairly small.
Looking at Alexa's top sites I see the following sites within just the top 40 that can't operate in Italy without risk of a prosecution of this sort: facebook, youtube, wikipedia, blogger, twitter, myspace, wordpress, amazon, ebay, linkedin, livejasmin, rapidshare, flickr, craigslist (most of the remaining sites are search engines).
I find it interesting the objections begin and end with 'it would be impossible to review all content'. Not that I want that, but someone could probably figure out a way.
Why does no one bring up the fact that it's completely subjective? What one person finds offensive is completely different from another person. The internet will suddenly consist only of kittens and puppies in an effort by companies to avoid suits, and then someone will decide kittens and puppies are offensive too.
(I understand Italy isn't seeking specifically to ban things that are simply offensive, but that's the direction we'd go just seconds after letting a suit like this one go through)
And Italy adds itself to Iran, Venezuela, China, North Korea, much of the Arab world, and Australia as countries who hate, fear, and wish to destroy the internet and the horrible, horrible freedom it gives to individuals.
The whole thing is so ridiculous that I expect something else is behind it. Given Italy's track record with corruption, could it be that Google is being punished for refusing to pay up?
by the way, they were given 6 months suspended jail sentences:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000092-264.html
I have some italian friends, and they've told me about this censorship also. Berlusconi doesn't even try to hide it apparently. One has to ask how someone like this can get elected - I suppose the answer is that he controls the media!! Italians, you have my sympathy...
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