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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.
by gbhn 17y ago
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.
- Silhouette 17y agoSure, 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.
- gridspy 17y agoHow 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? Why do you expect someone else to?
- Silhouette 17y agoThrowing 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.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoThere 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. This is worth reflecting on it, however.
- Silhouette 17y ago> 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".
- dnunes 17y agoWhat about sites like Wikileaks, where someone can anonymously post documents that are of political and social pertinence?