8 ms·

None of that is a reason to make a law that has a private company decide what are in effect criminal cases against citizens. The minister responsible at some p

None of that is a reason to make a law that has a private company decide what are in effect criminal cases against citizens. The minister responsible at some point made the completely idiotic remark that that is the right way to go because Facebook and the like are making a lot of money, so they also should be responsible for these costs. It seems like you can be a minister in Germany and never have heard of this concept called "taxes" that other countries use to finance an independent judicial system.

emn13 9y ago
By any normal definition these aren't criminal cases. People don't end up losing jobs, going behind bars, gaining criminal records. They usually won't even lose their accounts; certainly the law doesn't suggest that. They simply cannot spread hate-speech. The actual effects of this law in terms of possibly useful message lost are minuscule compared to the real culprits of goverment-enforced speech restrictions: namely copyrights ( and extras like DMCA) & libel laws. Those actually matter. This doesn't.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > By any normal definition these aren't criminal cases. It is a decision made to limit your constitutional freedoms due to legal obligations towards the public. That is very much the definition of a criminal case. > People don't end up losing jobs, going behind bars, gaining criminal records. Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case. > They simply cannot spread hate-speech. So, Titanic was spreading hate speech then? > The actual effects of this law in terms of possibly useful message lost are minuscule compared to the real culprits of goverment-enforced speech restrictions: namely copyrights ( and extras like DMCA) & libel laws. Those actually matter. Which is relevant to whether this is a good law how?
  - thesimon 9y ago
    >It is a decision made to limit your constitutional freedoms Just because your Facebook post is deleted does not mean your constitional right to free speech is limited.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Correct. Which is why you might want to read the full context of this discussion, which should then tell you that this is not about "Facebook just deleting a post", but about the state systematically incentivising Facebook to act in such a way that if the state itself acted in that way, that would obviously be a violation of your constitutional freedoms. Indirect action through a private entity does not make otherwise unconstitutional things constitutional.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        You know Germany doesn't govern itself according to the US constitution, yes?
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        You know that the word "constitution" is not reserved for the US constitution, yes?
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        You certainly seem to be trying to apply the standards of the US constitution to german law. I think you should be more specific if you wish to be clearly understood.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        How do I seem like that when I am talking about "the constitution" in the context of German law? Maybe I should also mention that I am talking about the German NetzDG, not the US NetzDG?
  - erAck 9y ago
    > Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case. It is not, it is an administrative offence.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Which is, in the broad sense, a subcategory of criminal law (as opposed to civil law).
      - geococcyxc 9y ago
        This is at least wrong in Germany, they are handled by different courts, will not show up on criminal record etc., it's more like a civil case, but with the government. Though of course you could park your car so horribly that it might get to be one, there's criminal neglect.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Erm ... in which sense exactly is an Ordnungswidrigkeitenverfahren like a Zivilprozess? How are the courts different? Also, yes, "but with the government" is exactly what makes it a criminal case!? See also: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnungswidrigkeit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnungswidrigkeit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafrecht_(Deutschland) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafrecht_(Deutschland)
        geococcyxc 9y ago
        Sorry, I was wrong about the courts, but at first it is not even handled by a court or prosecutor at all, only by the administration. If the potential fine is not accepted it then indeed goes to criminal court.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Well, yes, Ordnungswidrkeiten are "Straftaten light", if you will, so consequences are generally less severe, the process has a shortcut for undisputed cases, ... but the essence is still that the state makes a member of society experience some consequences for not following the law, and thus in particular the same constitutional protections apply.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case. It actually isn't. PArking ticket and the like are administrative violations, not criminal. Admittedly most people are unaware of this distinction; unfortunately that lack of awareness is exploited by, for example, politicians and pundits who describe all undocumented immigrants as criminals, when in fact many of them are in administrative violation and might be deportable but are not guilty of criminal acts or subject to criminal penalties. So, Titanic was spreading hate speech then? Against who? I have a feeling I'm going to roll my eyes at the answer, though.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      > It actually isn't. PArking ticket and the like are administrative violations, not criminal. Which is, as I pointed out elsewhere, a subcategory of criminal law int he broad sense (as opposed to civil law). Yes, Ordnungswidrigkeiten are not Straftaten, but that is not what this discussion is about. Ordnungswidrigkeitenverfahren have the exact same constitutional limitations as Strafverfahren. > Against who? I have a feeling I'm going to roll my eyes at the answer, though. Maybe ask someone who claimed that the NetzDG only limits hate speech?
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Further conversation with someone who refuses to give a straight answer to a question is clearly a waste of time. Goodbye.
baq 9y ago
Facebook makes money off that criminal activity via ads. It's not as clear cut as you make it.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  ... and therefore they should be the ones that decide the case?! I'm not sure I follow. Every large corporation makes money off people using their services for illegal purposes, that's not exactly a reason to give them powers to decide legal cases against their customers, is it?
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Actually... the most obvious case where large corporations make money off people using their services for illegal purposes - banks - require the bank to shut down the account if it appears the customer might be doing something dodgy. So there's definitely precedent.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Really, that's not exactly true. Normally, they only have to report suspicious behaviour. Many banks also choose to close accounts that they perceive as risky, and that in some ways is similar to this case, and for the same reason equally problematic.
  - thesimon 9y ago
    >powers to decide legal cases against their customers Facebook is free to do whatever they want on their platform. There are no legal cases involved.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Which is why noone said there was. This is what is known as an analogy.
      - 9y ago
tpm 9y ago
If you think any judicial system in the world is - or could be - equipped to deal with millions of potentially criminal comments from a social network on a case per case basis you are deluding yourself. More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and leaving the costs to pick up for everyone else, while facebook siphoons the profits to tax havens.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > If you think any judicial system in the world is - or could be - equipped to deal with millions of potentially criminal comments from a social network on a case per case basis you are deluding yourself. So, what's your point then? No judicial system possibly could, but Facebook can? Or Facebook can't either, so let's just ignore the constitution? > More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and leaving the costs to pick up for everyone else, while facebook siphoons the profits to tax havens. Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!? Also, I'm not sure it's really exactly correct to say that Facebook is the source of these costs, given that it's citizens who say illegal things. If people meet in a pub to commit Volksverhetzung, is the pub the source of the law enforcement costs?
  - tpm 9y ago
    Which constitution? The German one? I am sure they did not ignore it when writing this law, and if they did, someone will refer it to the BVerfG, which can then cancel the law. Anyway, private media (as opposed to public media, such as the BBC, ARD etc where the rules are very different) are not bound by laws or constitution to publish everything anyone throws at them. The corporations and individuals are free to do anything that is not forbidden by laws. So Facebook is free to decide what to publish, unless it is forbidden by law. > Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!? Perhaps I missed where you mentioned raising taxes for Facebook as a solution. That's an interesting idea. I see two possible problems with that: 1) Facebook sells ads. Other companies sell ads. How do we decide who pays the higher tax and who not, and make it fair? For example, Google (sans Youtube and the irrelevant G+) is not a social network, but can still spread disinfo, hate speech etc. Should they pay the tax too? 2) Even if we had the money for such a judicial system, there is still the question of effectivity - the damage spreads very fast in this case, can we even design such a thing that provides good value for money while staying reasonably objective? And of course Facebook has the same problem now, as other private media (newspapers, TV stations) had before them - and the cheap solution seems to be to err on the side of caution. Are you soure we can do better? I think it is correct, Facebook (and twitter, ...) extracts value from communication between citizens, and it looks like (e.g. from the Economist article mentiond above) also creates negative externalities that did not exist before.
candiodari 9y ago
Unfortunately government making laws boils, when examining this closely, comes down to lawyers making laws. That is the most common job and education in congress, and parliaments in Europe are no different, even stronger. Second is economics. What you won't find is engineers, of any kind, developers, or any kind of practical education. Which means laws very often ignore practical considerations as to how they were applied. An example often given is equality between men and women. Since 1980s and up to 2005 in various countries laws were passed that married and unmarried couples are equal before the law. Including of course same sex couples, or "couples" involving more than 2 people. I'm not complaining about that concept, but it's implementation is emblematic of just how bad governments are. However ... 1) Okay, they're equal. So when are 2 or more people a couple ? Not specified, of course (courts seem to have settled on when you share address for a given amount of time you're married. So Good News (tm) ! You were legally married if you had a roommate in college). 2) Related. When are people not a couple anymore ? Not specified. 3) What if these people separate ? Are the any obligations ? Not specified. 4) What if people are living together and one, unbeknownst to the other, incurs a great debt ? Can that debt be held against the other (like for married couples) ? Unspecified. 5) What about shared ownership ? What about registering a property/house in both their names ? Unspecified. 6) Does entering in a couple relationship (as in living at the same address for a while) give raise to obligations in case of separation ? What about kids, adopted or otherwise ? Does one party owe the other alimony if they separate in less than amicable circumstances ? Unspecified. 7) What about all of tenancy law, family law, contract law, ... all of which applies ("applied") differently to couples and separate individuals ? A million questions. All of which are unspecified. What if 3 people are living together and one adopts a kid ? Do all 3 have custody now ? How about separation ? Congress, however, merely wanted to look good voting a very generic law into existence. There was close to zero consideration of how that affected all existing systems, and even when problems became apparent, no reaction from parliament. And if it's this bad for things that are directly in the domain of lawyers themselves, you can imagine just how bad it is for things they don't understand.
- pmyteh 9y ago
  Oh, don't be daft. It's never as careless as 'simply legislate equality'. Look at the UK's Civil Partnership Act 2004 if you want to see how this stuff is normally done. 264 clauses and 30 schedules to make clear what law applies to people in civil partnerships and what doesn't (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/33/contents https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/33/contents). When a government passes a law prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of (say) gender identity, it essentially inherits the previous caselaw from previous employment discrimination acts - so if you know how not to discriminate against women, you have a pretty good idea how not to discriminate against transwomen. Finally, quite a lot of changes are made piecemeal by caselaw anyway - that's the basis of the Anglo-American common law. So even as adoption law (say) evolves, it does so casewise, not generally by handing a large edict from on high and breaking people's understanding of what the law is. At least in the UK, parental responsibility (and, separately, custody) are well-defined, including the cases where there are zero, one, two, or more people holding it. Grandparents and friends raising children has, after all, been a thing for centuries. Ditto handling splitting partnerships, ditto handling unconventional domestic arrangements. Ditto tenancy law. Ditto contract law. Particularly ditto shared ownership, which can even legally handle weird situations where people bought houses on behalf of other people who died, and... I'm really not sure what basis your argument is actually on.
MulliMulli 9y ago
Facebook paid 466.000 Euros in taxes in Germany / 2015. (Source http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/neue-finanzstruktur-wie-viel-steuern-facebook-in-deutschland-zahlt/20709186.html http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/neue-finanzstruktur-wi...)
anigbrowl 9y ago
a law that has a private company decide what are in effect criminal cases against citizens The private company is a publisher which is being held responsible for what it chooses to publish. Individual citizens have a right to hold and express their views, but not an automatic right to publication. If their views are so odious as to invite criminal sanction, it's entirely reasonable for them to incur extra costs/difficulty of publication. Now this is where someone usually pipes up with 'but my freedoms!' and that's all very well, but if the freedom they wish to exercise involves proposing limits on the freedom of others (perhaps even by ending their lives) then that person is proposing a zero-sum view of freedom for others and cannot complain about having a zero-sum calculus imposed upon their own political expression. Popper's paradox of tolerance may be explicable in terms of the boundary between positive and zero-sum games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  Which is relevant to the question of whether a private company should decide legal cases against citizens how exactly? > Individual citizens have a right to hold and express their views, but not an automatic right to publication. Well, yes, that is what that means. They have a right to not be hindered by the state in publishing their opinion (unless hate speech, essentially).
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Declining to publish isn't the same as deciding a legal case. Nobody has a right to be published by another party.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Congrats on consistently missing the point.
      - dang 9y ago
        If you continue to post uncivil comments to Hacker News, we will ban you.

emn13 9y ago

By any normal definition these aren't criminal cases. People don't end up losing jobs, going behind bars, gaining criminal records. They usually won't even lose their accounts; certainly the law doesn't suggest that. They simply cannot spread hate-speech. The actual effects of this law in terms of possibly useful message lost are minuscule compared to the real culprits of goverment-enforced speech restrictions: namely copyrights ( and extras like DMCA) & libel laws. Those actually matter. This doesn't.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> By any normal definition these aren't criminal cases. It is a decision made to limit your constitutional freedoms due to legal obligations towards the public. That is very much the definition of a criminal case. > People don't end up losing jobs, going behind bars, gaining criminal records. Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case. > They simply cannot spread hate-speech. So, Titanic was spreading hate speech then? > The actual effects of this law in terms of possibly useful message lost are minuscule compared to the real culprits of goverment-enforced speech restrictions: namely copyrights ( and extras like DMCA) & libel laws. Those actually matter. Which is relevant to whether this is a good law how?
- thesimon 9y ago
  >It is a decision made to limit your constitutional freedoms Just because your Facebook post is deleted does not mean your constitional right to free speech is limited.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Correct. Which is why you might want to read the full context of this discussion, which should then tell you that this is not about "Facebook just deleting a post", but about the state systematically incentivising Facebook to act in such a way that if the state itself acted in that way, that would obviously be a violation of your constitutional freedoms. Indirect action through a private entity does not make otherwise unconstitutional things constitutional.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      You know Germany doesn't govern itself according to the US constitution, yes?
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        You know that the word "constitution" is not reserved for the US constitution, yes?
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        You certainly seem to be trying to apply the standards of the US constitution to german law. I think you should be more specific if you wish to be clearly understood.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        How do I seem like that when I am talking about "the constitution" in the context of German law? Maybe I should also mention that I am talking about the German NetzDG, not the US NetzDG?
- erAck 9y ago
  > Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case. It is not, it is an administrative offence.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Which is, in the broad sense, a subcategory of criminal law (as opposed to civil law).
    - geococcyxc 9y ago
      This is at least wrong in Germany, they are handled by different courts, will not show up on criminal record etc., it's more like a civil case, but with the government. Though of course you could park your car so horribly that it might get to be one, there's criminal neglect.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Erm ... in which sense exactly is an Ordnungswidrigkeitenverfahren like a Zivilprozess? How are the courts different? Also, yes, "but with the government" is exactly what makes it a criminal case!? See also: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnungswidrigkeit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnungswidrigkeit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafrecht_(Deutschland) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafrecht_(Deutschland)
        geococcyxc 9y ago
        Sorry, I was wrong about the courts, but at first it is not even handled by a court or prosecutor at all, only by the administration. If the potential fine is not accepted it then indeed goes to criminal court.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Well, yes, Ordnungswidrkeiten are "Straftaten light", if you will, so consequences are generally less severe, the process has a shortcut for undisputed cases, ... but the essence is still that the state makes a member of society experience some consequences for not following the law, and thus in particular the same constitutional protections apply.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case. It actually isn't. PArking ticket and the like are administrative violations, not criminal. Admittedly most people are unaware of this distinction; unfortunately that lack of awareness is exploited by, for example, politicians and pundits who describe all undocumented immigrants as criminals, when in fact many of them are in administrative violation and might be deportable but are not guilty of criminal acts or subject to criminal penalties. So, Titanic was spreading hate speech then? Against who? I have a feeling I'm going to roll my eyes at the answer, though.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > It actually isn't. PArking ticket and the like are administrative violations, not criminal. Which is, as I pointed out elsewhere, a subcategory of criminal law int he broad sense (as opposed to civil law). Yes, Ordnungswidrigkeiten are not Straftaten, but that is not what this discussion is about. Ordnungswidrigkeitenverfahren have the exact same constitutional limitations as Strafverfahren. > Against who? I have a feeling I'm going to roll my eyes at the answer, though. Maybe ask someone who claimed that the NetzDG only limits hate speech?
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Further conversation with someone who refuses to give a straight answer to a question is clearly a waste of time. Goodbye.

baq 9y ago

Facebook makes money off that criminal activity via ads. It's not as clear cut as you make it.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
... and therefore they should be the ones that decide the case?! I'm not sure I follow. Every large corporation makes money off people using their services for illegal purposes, that's not exactly a reason to give them powers to decide legal cases against their customers, is it?
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Actually... the most obvious case where large corporations make money off people using their services for illegal purposes - banks - require the bank to shut down the account if it appears the customer might be doing something dodgy. So there's definitely precedent.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Really, that's not exactly true. Normally, they only have to report suspicious behaviour. Many banks also choose to close accounts that they perceive as risky, and that in some ways is similar to this case, and for the same reason equally problematic.
- thesimon 9y ago
  >powers to decide legal cases against their customers Facebook is free to do whatever they want on their platform. There are no legal cases involved.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Which is why noone said there was. This is what is known as an analogy.
    - 9y ago

tpm 9y ago

If you think any judicial system in the world is - or could be - equipped to deal with millions of potentially criminal comments from a social network on a case per case basis you are deluding yourself. More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and leaving the costs to pick up for everyone else, while facebook siphoons the profits to tax havens.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> If you think any judicial system in the world is - or could be - equipped to deal with millions of potentially criminal comments from a social network on a case per case basis you are deluding yourself. So, what's your point then? No judicial system possibly could, but Facebook can? Or Facebook can't either, so let's just ignore the constitution? > More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and leaving the costs to pick up for everyone else, while facebook siphoons the profits to tax havens. Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!? Also, I'm not sure it's really exactly correct to say that Facebook is the source of these costs, given that it's citizens who say illegal things. If people meet in a pub to commit Volksverhetzung, is the pub the source of the law enforcement costs?
- tpm 9y ago
  Which constitution? The German one? I am sure they did not ignore it when writing this law, and if they did, someone will refer it to the BVerfG, which can then cancel the law. Anyway, private media (as opposed to public media, such as the BBC, ARD etc where the rules are very different) are not bound by laws or constitution to publish everything anyone throws at them. The corporations and individuals are free to do anything that is not forbidden by laws. So Facebook is free to decide what to publish, unless it is forbidden by law. > Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!? Perhaps I missed where you mentioned raising taxes for Facebook as a solution. That's an interesting idea. I see two possible problems with that: 1) Facebook sells ads. Other companies sell ads. How do we decide who pays the higher tax and who not, and make it fair? For example, Google (sans Youtube and the irrelevant G+) is not a social network, but can still spread disinfo, hate speech etc. Should they pay the tax too? 2) Even if we had the money for such a judicial system, there is still the question of effectivity - the damage spreads very fast in this case, can we even design such a thing that provides good value for money while staying reasonably objective? And of course Facebook has the same problem now, as other private media (newspapers, TV stations) had before them - and the cheap solution seems to be to err on the side of caution. Are you soure we can do better? I think it is correct, Facebook (and twitter, ...) extracts value from communication between citizens, and it looks like (e.g. from the Economist article mentiond above) also creates negative externalities that did not exist before.

candiodari 9y ago

Unfortunately government making laws boils, when examining this closely, comes down to lawyers making laws. That is the most common job and education in congress, and parliaments in Europe are no different, even stronger. Second is economics. What you won't find is engineers, of any kind, developers, or any kind of practical education. Which means laws very often ignore practical considerations as to how they were applied. An example often given is equality between men and women. Since 1980s and up to 2005 in various countries laws were passed that married and unmarried couples are equal before the law. Including of course same sex couples, or "couples" involving more than 2 people. I'm not complaining about that concept, but it's implementation is emblematic of just how bad governments are. However ... 1) Okay, they're equal. So when are 2 or more people a couple ? Not specified, of course (courts seem to have settled on when you share address for a given amount of time you're married. So Good News (tm) ! You were legally married if you had a roommate in college). 2) Related. When are people not a couple anymore ? Not specified. 3) What if these people separate ? Are the any obligations ? Not specified. 4) What if people are living together and one, unbeknownst to the other, incurs a great debt ? Can that debt be held against the other (like for married couples) ? Unspecified. 5) What about shared ownership ? What about registering a property/house in both their names ? Unspecified. 6) Does entering in a couple relationship (as in living at the same address for a while) give raise to obligations in case of separation ? What about kids, adopted or otherwise ? Does one party owe the other alimony if they separate in less than amicable circumstances ? Unspecified. 7) What about all of tenancy law, family law, contract law, ... all of which applies ("applied") differently to couples and separate individuals ? A million questions. All of which are unspecified. What if 3 people are living together and one adopts a kid ? Do all 3 have custody now ? How about separation ? Congress, however, merely wanted to look good voting a very generic law into existence. There was close to zero consideration of how that affected all existing systems, and even when problems became apparent, no reaction from parliament. And if it's this bad for things that are directly in the domain of lawyers themselves, you can imagine just how bad it is for things they don't understand.

pmyteh 9y ago
Oh, don't be daft. It's never as careless as 'simply legislate equality'. Look at the UK's Civil Partnership Act 2004 if you want to see how this stuff is normally done. 264 clauses and 30 schedules to make clear what law applies to people in civil partnerships and what doesn't (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/33/contents https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/33/contents). When a government passes a law prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of (say) gender identity, it essentially inherits the previous caselaw from previous employment discrimination acts - so if you know how not to discriminate against women, you have a pretty good idea how not to discriminate against transwomen. Finally, quite a lot of changes are made piecemeal by caselaw anyway - that's the basis of the Anglo-American common law. So even as adoption law (say) evolves, it does so casewise, not generally by handing a large edict from on high and breaking people's understanding of what the law is. At least in the UK, parental responsibility (and, separately, custody) are well-defined, including the cases where there are zero, one, two, or more people holding it. Grandparents and friends raising children has, after all, been a thing for centuries. Ditto handling splitting partnerships, ditto handling unconventional domestic arrangements. Ditto tenancy law. Ditto contract law. Particularly ditto shared ownership, which can even legally handle weird situations where people bought houses on behalf of other people who died, and... I'm really not sure what basis your argument is actually on.

MulliMulli 9y ago

Facebook paid 466.000 Euros in taxes in Germany / 2015. (Source http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/neue-finanzstruktur-wie-viel-steuern-facebook-in-deutschland-zahlt/20709186.html http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/neue-finanzstruktur-wi...)

anigbrowl 9y ago

a law that has a private company decide what are in effect criminal cases against citizens The private company is a publisher which is being held responsible for what it chooses to publish. Individual citizens have a right to hold and express their views, but not an automatic right to publication. If their views are so odious as to invite criminal sanction, it's entirely reasonable for them to incur extra costs/difficulty of publication. Now this is where someone usually pipes up with 'but my freedoms!' and that's all very well, but if the freedom they wish to exercise involves proposing limits on the freedom of others (perhaps even by ending their lives) then that person is proposing a zero-sum view of freedom for others and cannot complain about having a zero-sum calculus imposed upon their own political expression. Popper's paradox of tolerance may be explicable in terms of the boundary between positive and zero-sum games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
Which is relevant to the question of whether a private company should decide legal cases against citizens how exactly? > Individual citizens have a right to hold and express their views, but not an automatic right to publication. Well, yes, that is what that means. They have a right to not be hindered by the state in publishing their opinion (unless hate speech, essentially).
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Declining to publish isn't the same as deciding a legal case. Nobody has a right to be published by another party.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Congrats on consistently missing the point.
    - dang 9y ago
      If you continue to post uncivil comments to Hacker News, we will ban you.