141–150 of 183 posts
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As much as the Austrian conviction and this whole discussion about blasphemy and "religious freedom" makes me P.O., she was convicted of paying 500 Euros.
So her speech isn't free as in liberty or as in beer, eh?
I'd say the case was good to highlight the absurdity of it. And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.
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I've dug into that topic a bit. The summary is if you're a German resident OR you're making a website aimed at German residents, you might be successfully sued. Where is it hosted, or whether it is in German at all doesn't matter much. There is of course always an option to use anonymous hosting and make it hard to identify you from the website content. Then people whose business is to sue other people on the interne…
> Where is it hosted, or whether it is in German at all doesn't matter much Well, it matters in that if you don't live in the EU, it is unlikely that they will be able to target you for anything. People in America don't spend much time worrying about the fact that in Saudi Arabia it is illegal to be gay, so I don't see why they would worry the much about copywrite laws in the EU.
I guess he means you can't escape the law simply by hosting the site outside of Germany, if you still want to live in Germany, because then they can sue you, even if the country where your site is hosted does not require you to display your home address, phone, etc.
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> Maybe this will revitalize hosting of personal websites where there’s no “platform” to censor your free speech? Then you have basically unlimited liability, as far as I can tell; hardly seems like an upside.
No, not unless you allow user uploads from other users .
I have been searching for this but couldn't find any answer, let's say a company has a generic public platform where people can upload text, images, videos, audio, ... how are they supposed to be able to check for copyright infringment against every single upload? I know that Youtube has its own content id system, but for anyone without YT's resouces, is ther any 3rd party service to which you can pass content and ge…
"Did you create this item from your own efforts without the inclusion of material copyright to other entities? Y / N"
That's a filter. Not a particularly sophisticated one, but the majority of websites shouldn't be hosting anything that answers N to that anyhow. Little Northville Cycling Club, for example, probably shouldn't be hosting satire based on copyright works. It's just too legally risky.
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> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more It is absolutely not. That's a preposterous assumption. If it was the case then no European state could send people to prison or fine them for having an opinion, yet look at France, where insulting the president is a crime and denying "official" history has landed people in jail (I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle)…
Its not exactly the same but its a felony to threaten the president in the US. US freedom of speech is not close to absolute with all kinds of exceptions made over the years, from yelling fire in a theater to verbal harassment.
This is sad and disgusting, our speech is being limited completely unfairly and without our consent and we're being told that it's a good thing. The fact that they're trying to package it as some sort of well-deserved revenge against silicon valley big tech is just tasteless. The EU's big gripe against these companies is their tax situation, if they really wanted to change that then they'd be looking into a unified a…
Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Freedom of speech in Europe is not just an EU question, but also - and mainly - up to constitutions and legislation of the member states. So of course it varies. But there is less surveillance in Europe on what citizens say online, European media is less centralized than American, there are more par…
This is a really strong statement, and one that seems incredibly difficult to defend.
It is a good point that free speech is a matter not only of what is legally permitted but what is possible to carry out; online privacy and varied, independent media are major factors in speech actually being heard. Both regulatory and economic factors have done real harm to the US media landscape, although the claim that online speech is less surveilled in Europe is depends on exactly what one checks - and is largely a matter of US companies rejecting foreign subpoenas, not a lack of effort on Europe's part.
Beyond that, though... a strong context for speech isn't enough either, if speech isn't actually legal. Europe falls far behind the US on legal speech protections of all kinds. In the general case, libel and defamation rules are extremely narrow in the US, and far broader in most of Europe. In terms of specific speech, I pretty often see people suggest that EU countries haven't banned anything except hate speech, and more specifically that Germany banned Nazi iconography without restricting speech in general. Let's ignore those cases, and ignore the usual debates around when criticism of religion crosses into hate speech.
Even so, the First Amendment is genuinely unique:
- France can assess high fines and years in prison for the "positive presentation of drugs", and regularly uses this law against drug reform advocates, including politicians. Meanwhile, the US refused to implement Article 3 of the UN Narcotic Drugs Convention (banning promotion of drugs) on Constitutional grounds.
- At least four countries (and until recently Germany) have general lese majeste laws protecting all heads of state from insult, which is about the clearest restriction of legitimate and valuable speech I can think of. Several other countries ban insult to their own heads of state. The Netherlands in particular actually enforce their law regularly, in excess of the protections accorded to any non-royalty. Meanwhile, heads of state are not only not specially protected in the US, but receive less libel protection than nonpublic figures.
- Poland past a law against making factually-accurate statements about the history of the Holocaust in Poland, and only after international outcry did they remove criminal penalties for those statements. Enough said.
- Germany convicts more than 20,000 people per year under its ban on 'insult' alone. §86a, its widely praised law against Nazi iconography, also bans not just Communist iconography but Kurdish military symbols. It was repeatedly used against anti-Nazi content containing broken or crossed-out symbols, a practice that ended only in 2007, after a lawmaker reported herself to the police for the offense as a protest.
- German internet law is uniquely restrictive. It includes a list of several thousand banned websites, judged by an unelected agency to be harmful to minors, many of them mislabeled or improperly banned. The errors have gone unchallenged because there's no appeal process, and in fact the list itself is aggressively censored. Discounting national security letters, I believe that's the only standardized secret law censorship in any developed country. The 2017 ban on fake news, 'NetzDG', has been condemned as unconstitutional and unethical by virtually every academic or free speech organization to address the topic, with the UN singling it out as "endangering human rights".
This is not a happy list, and those are only brief highlights. Privacy and free media are valuable for making speech visible, but so is permitting free speech. Intrinsic rights to speech aside, that list includes an awful lot of moral, pro-social things which can't be said.
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I wanted to add that, in the US, it isn't primarily the constitution that protects its freedoms, but rather the structure of their government and how it's been setup for gridlock among all the parties involved (not that that property has been preserved too well of late). Antonin Scalia explained it really well in one of his appearances in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--…
> I wanted to add that, in the US, it isn't primarily the constitution that protects its freedoms, but rather the structure of their government and how it's been setup for gridlock among all the parties involved That protects established injustices as much as it protects established freedoms. Perhaps more, since the fundamental structure incorporates a number of injustices.
Not really. The legislature had to pass a law creating slavery, the executive had to sign it, the courts had to uphold it. Any of them could have said no. The same was true of laws prohibiting women from working, or Jim Crow laws, or laws excluding same sex marriage, etc. To enforce any of these things required broad assent, as designed, and they mostly fell to individual branches having enough. Lincoln unilaterally ended slavery, the courts struck down laws against same sex marriage, etc.
There is only a very thin range of things checks and balances actually prevent. First it has to be something the government has to act to prevent rather than merely cease to prop up, which as injustices go is pretty rare in its own right. Then you need at the same time enough support to prohibit it in a simple majority system but not enough support to prohibit it in a system of checks and balances, which crosses off all the most egregious ones -- there is >80% support for laws requiring schools to accept black students, so checks and balances don't prevent those laws from existing, and they do.
What you're left with is the things with 50%+1 support but not e.g. 67% support. But that's what checks and balances are supposed to do -- prevent you from passing laws against things nearly half the country doesn't support having a law against. If you want that law then you need to convince more people first. Is that really so bad?
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So her speech isn't free as in liberty or as in beer, eh?
So, like Java? I'd say the case was good to highlight the absurdity of it. And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.
|And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.
Wait, you think this was acceptable? The fine for speaking is outrageous, and it will only get worse if it turns out it's not enough of a deterrent.
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So her speech isn't free as in liberty or as in beer, eh?
So, like Java? I'd say the case was good to highlight the absurdity of it. And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.
What a bullshit title. It is not aimed at Google and Facebook. Those are the companies that have more than enough resources to be compliant. It's the small and aspiring companies that are not yet established that would suffer the most from this directive. Googles, Amazons and Facebooks would be just fine, safer then ever since the barrier to entry is bigger and bigger with every new directive.
This is aimed at Google and Facebook, in the sense that the people voting for it cite Google and Facebook as targets, and the companies advocating it view Google as decreasing their profits. That's where publishers are hoping to find new revenues, and where lawmakers are using public anger to garner support.
Unfortunately, the people drafting the law have terrible aim, so it's going to hit primarily startups and not-for-profit sites, raising Facebook's staffing costs slightly while crippling creativity and public access to information. Presumably the people looking to profit on Google links simply don't care about that, although I can't tell whether the lawmakers supporting this don't care about the harms or are genuinely too incompetent to understand what they're doing.