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The problem is that so many sites have social networking aspects to them, like the Supreme Court ruling pointed out. The North Carolina law is this: http://www.
by erroneousfunk 9y ago
The problem is that so many sites have social networking aspects to them, like the Supreme Court ruling pointed out. The North Carolina law is this: http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/statutes/statutelookup.pl?statute=14-202.5 http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/statutes/statutelookup.pl?sta...
This law does not prohibit the offender from _making a profile_ on these sites, but from accessing them altogether. So any site that allows users (news commenters, product reviewers, whatever) to have a "user profile" page cannot be accessed.
Amazon.com meets these criteria: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGRXMFWYARWRFWYV4CN7I52OI53A https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGRXMFWYARWR...
Stack Overflow meets these criteria: https://stackoverflow.com/users/8131287/data-scientist https://stackoverflow.com/users/8131287/data-scientist
Github, all of Google, Wikipedia, ALSO meet this criteria. (Although Hacker News does not)
There are a few key things that are problematic with the wording of this law:
1. "Facilitates the social introduction between two or more persons for the purposes of friendship, meeting other persons, or information exchanges."
The key word is "or" Every website is involved in information exchanges. This effectively does not limit the scope of the law.
2. The requirements of the profile pages contain "and" statements, but they're fairly generic. Name or username/nickname, photographs, and links placed somehow to other friends and associates. If there's a profile page, you can usually access some sort of activity log of the user (comments they've replied to, which may lead to users they've interacted with directly or indirectly) The only real limit here is the photograph, which not all websites (like Hacker News) have.
3. There is an exception involving "Has as its primary purpose the facilitation of commercial transactions involving goods or services between its members or visitors." However, this does not exclude sites like Amazon, given the strict wording of the law. Members are not exchanging goods with each other. This would exclude sites like Craigslist.
4. There is another exception: "Provides only one of the following discrete services: photo-sharing, electronic mail, instant messenger, or chat room or message board platform" The problem with this is that there aren't many "discrete service" websites that exist anymore. Google provides all of these services, Yahoo provides all of these services. Hotmail provides all of these services. Services like chats, forums, e-mail, and photo sharing are often bundled by a huge collection of other services.
5. The vague wording of "Web site" Is it a single domain? A single corporate entity? A single subdomain? The vague wording only works in favor of the law here.
- ivraatiems 9y ago> (Although Hacker News does not) I think it does - we have profiles with info like our personal website URL, twitter handle, a brief description on them. Here's mine, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ivraatiems https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ivraatiems
- erroneousfunk 9y agoBut we don't have photos in the profiles
- scott00 9y agoI take a different reading of clause 3. The main criteria is "Allows users to create Web pages or personal profiles that contain information". The restrictions following that are prefaced by "such as"... which is a very weird word choice for legal stuff. Usually you see stuff like "including but not limited to the following" or "including all of the following". So a bit of a wild card, but the common usage of such as is to preface representative but not exhaustive examples. So I don't think a site has to fit all of the such as criteria to be included, or even any of it. It just has to have pages with information of a type similar to the given examples, which I think Hacker News profiles clearly has.
- erroneousfunk 9y agoAh, yeah, that makes sense. This makes the law even worse.
- dragonwriter 9y agoWith regard to the profile page elements, you seem to be reading “information, such as...” (which is usually read in legal, and plain, English as introducing a lost of examples) as meaning “information which includes, at a minimum, all of...”. The more normal reading of “such ad” makes the scope of the law even broader than you describe (and would seem likely to include HN, which you view as excluded because it doesn't include every enumerated kind of information, specifically missing pictures, in it's profile pages.)