
Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments - scott_karana
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/shock-european-court-decision-websites-are-liable-for-users-comments/
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foobarandgrill
Considering the article is from two years ago it's not such a shock now.

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bllguo
Yeah, this is incredibly misleading.

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mavdi
This is great. Websites are keen on publishing these comments and benefit from
the angry clickbaits and discussions, they should then be responsible for them
too. If it's on your website and you're displaying it, then you own it.

I want this applied to Facebook and all its racist, sexist and homophobic user
content too.

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GCU-Empiricist
So what is the scalable solution to allow discussion without causing automated
censorship, inflicting astroturfing vulnerability, or hiring significant staff
overhead that allows things like reddit to start up, or are you happy with the
ecosystem we have?

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jdavis703
Perhaps a pay-to-post scheme. If it takes $1 to make a post people will
comment a lot less, and hopefully when they do comment it'll be saying
something meaningful. This will also help reduce automated span.

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GCU-Empiricist
Personally I'm a fan of more speech, vice less, in hopes that more insightful
things bubble up, voting algorithms are an intresting puzzle but I'd prefer to
see discussion without making people who can't afford it silent.

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r00fus
I wonder what the fallout will be for small websites running their own comment
streams vs. Disqus vs. Facebook.

Will these websites prevent or bifurcate access from Europe?

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gruez
[2015]

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shak77
Shock? This has been like this since forever.

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cryptonector
Free speech violates human rights. Got it.

Sarcasm aside, this ruling is the sort of insanity that one can expect from
human rights courts in countries that lack a long-standing commitment to
freedom of speech. The _very_ notion of a "human rights court" is foreign to
citizens of countries with nothing like the American Constitution's 1st
Amendment and absolutist jurisprudence that we have here in the U.S. No such
thing as a human rights court is necessary when the laws are themselves just
and enforced by just courts. From the U.S., the notion of "human rights court"
seems to exist only so as to impinge on individual freedoms rather than so as
to strengthen them, and this follows from the idea that they should not be
necessary in Western countries that should have just laws to begin with -- and
this perception is supported by this sort of ruling.

One even expects that saying the above alone will be seen as evidence of
racism/sexism/whatever-ism for even merely denying that a human rights court
should be necessary in the West... implies denial of human rights simply
because of the institution's very _name_. The very act of naming something in
this way leads to suspicion that it is a euphemistic name, like all those
People's Democratic Republics of yore (and, still, the DPRK), or the UN's very
own not-remotely-sane human rights commission.

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matt4077
“Human Rights” in this context is rather similar to the US’ Constitution’s
amendments, not whatever chain of free associations you are coming up with:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights)

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golemotron
Is there any justification for DMCA Safe Harbor [1] in the US anymore? When it
was enacted screening user content was considered not practical. Now is done
by almost every service.

[1] [http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise33.html](http://digital-
law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise33.html)

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jdavis703
Yes, screening content is still hard and/or expensive. It's more technically
feasible than before, but it's still one of the things small startups struggle
with.

