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>In the end this stuff doesn't strangle the open sourcers or the hacker culture... It only strangles big industry, the people pay the legislators' paychecks. A

>In the end this stuff doesn't strangle the open sourcers or the hacker culture... It only strangles big industry, the people pay the legislators' paychecks. Actually, you have it exactly backwards. Big corporation have teams of lawyers that will allow them to navigate this legal thicket. But your average open-source project, or blog? The first scary legal letter they get, asking for a six-to-seven figure amount for copyright infringement, will cause them to shut down. As far as I can tell, this law is a huge threat to any free-speech that threatens corporate interests, because the moment you link to the thing you're criticizing, you can be sued for thousands to millions, depending on how many people (allegedly) clicked. Under this legal regime, making it to the front page of Hacker News would be a literal kiss of death to almost organization that offends corporate interests. Maybe the EFF could handle the legal wrangling to prove that its links were "fair use", or whatever. Precious few others would be able to.

Silhouette 11y ago
Under this legal regime, making it to the front page of Hacker News would be a literal kiss of death to almost organization that offends corporate interests. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it seems to me that under this legal regime, an organization that offends corporate interests making it to the front page of HN would be the kiss of death to HN. The danger is that the mere act of linking to something controversial becomes guilt by association, and since in general someone who links to another site doesn't control the content on that other site, anyone can become guilty of whatever crimes result literally without having done anything wrong (beyond not constantly legally reviewing the content of every site they link to and removing links in real time in the event of any potential problem).
- quanticle 11y ago
  I don't know the specifics of the proposal, but I imagine that HN would be safe, unless the blog post author got annoyed at making it to the front page. Your point, however, is a good one. This legal framework would kill off Reddit, Hacker News, and all the other link aggregators out there. If linking to copyrighted material without permission counts as copyright infringement, then linking to anything, anywhere becomes a very dangerous act. It'd probably also hurt Twitter and Facebook badly (no more linking to viral videos or funny images).

Silhouette 11y ago

Under this legal regime, making it to the front page of Hacker News would be a literal kiss of death to almost organization that offends corporate interests. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it seems to me that under this legal regime, an organization that offends corporate interests making it to the front page of HN would be the kiss of death to HN. The danger is that the mere act of linking to something controversial becomes guilt by association, and since in general someone who links to another site doesn't control the content on that other site, anyone can become guilty of whatever crimes result literally without having done anything wrong (beyond not constantly legally reviewing the content of every site they link to and removing links in real time in the event of any potential problem).

quanticle 11y ago
I don't know the specifics of the proposal, but I imagine that HN would be safe, unless the blog post author got annoyed at making it to the front page. Your point, however, is a good one. This legal framework would kill off Reddit, Hacker News, and all the other link aggregators out there. If linking to copyrighted material without permission counts as copyright infringement, then linking to anything, anywhere becomes a very dangerous act. It'd probably also hurt Twitter and Facebook badly (no more linking to viral videos or funny images).