5 ms·

Under Australian law Google, Facebook etc. are considered publishers and publishers of defamatory content can be sued. This is not new and there are multiple pr

Under Australian law Google, Facebook etc. are considered publishers and publishers of defamatory content can be sued. This is not new and there are multiple precedences.

rektide 4y ago
I dont know how I feel about this case (seems like Youtube themselves understand they didnt move fast enough) but this idea that sites hosting user content are publishers is some truly evil modern backstabbing of the internet & what made it possible. It feels fantastic & absurd, a fictitious & inapplicable label or classification. This is a threat to basic freedom & if it erodes safe harbor protections it will have vast vast & terrifying chilling effects; online sites will have to radically scale back what they can offer the public. It's sad to think any random state can layer in whatever legal nightmare it might cobble together. Humanity shouldnt be so jointly bound to whatever deadweight amy random country cooks up.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  On the contrary, every other medium of publishing bears responsibility for its actions. You can sue a newspaper for publishing a defamatory editorial, why shouldn't you be able to sue YouTube for the same? The Internet is not magical or different, nor should it be above the law. The issue with national boundaries is simple: Companies have to respect the laws where they operate. When they choose to become multinational behemoths, they accept that cost. YouTube is free to not do business in Australia if it doesn't want to follow Australia's laws. But since they make billions of dollars doing business there, they presumably would rather follow the law, and try to pay off politicians to make the law favorable to their business.
  - rektide 4y ago
    The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly. Australia has long had a troubling & distrubing relationship with the press & allowed the wealthy & powerful inordinate legal control over publishing. To apply the same brutal regulation on 98% of human expression & exchange is ignoble. The scope of what you propose to regulate here is so vastly vastly greater. This application of old, already unreasonable, anti-speech practices to modern telecommunications is derangement. You notably havent shown any recognition whatsoever of the idea of safe harbor. You've presented only a case for total & complete responsibility, given no outlet or done anything to begin to allow user-content to exist, and are charging these entities with complete responsibility. This is comedically unworkable & a farce, unfit for consideration, in a world when gigabytes cost cents per month & bandwidth is plentiful. These tubes can all just rot & serve only industry & empire if what you propose is allowed. Only one other country proposes such draconian levels of ultimate responsibity, and that country also funds & pays for hundreds of thousands of censors & moderators operating directly under the state.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      The fact that several major governments have come nearly unglued over outright fictions perpetrated across free speech enthusiast platforms suggests unchecked speech isn't an inherent good. And YouTube doesn't allow free speech. Without regulation, it allows speech as defined as acceptable to YouTube's business. Worse than both regulated speech and free speech is what bad laws like Section 230 ensure: Corporate speech.
      - throwbigdata 4y ago
        Double plus good goodthought, citizen!
      - rektide 4y ago
        This argumemtation is getting darker & weirder quickly. These are publishers... but you dont like that they have rights to not-host content? How is a publisher supposed to do publishing if they also cant tell users they wont host their content? The wbole point of a so called publisher is to exercise their coproate speech rights, which you seem to protest heavily against, & thatcs very confusing to me. That right to pick & discern is the biggest thing 230 does. As for corproate speech & it's dangers, sites have a right to identity, to shape & grow themselves in ways they think are fit & healthy. That freedom in no way encumbers your right to speech, it doesnt threaten anyone: we all have abundant options for getting our voices out for sharing. We shouldnt all have to listen to whomever wants to yell; free speech doesnt mean every place on the planet must let whomever in to yell as they please. I dont go to a Borders bookstore to get shouted at by religious fringe groups. Bookstores dont have to have copies of books on the shelf, of perhaps these same groups. These defenses are also "corporate speech", the right of Borders Books to maintain their business & shape it. The internet itself rarely cuts anyone off, almost exclusively only under direct legal need, so there's endless options still available; the protest that everywhere, every big site should have to host content seems abominable, uncivil. We have to rely on sites, and a diversity of sites, or perhaps someday more p2p/direct-publish syndication. When a site grow rotten & oppressive, we can & should go vote with our feet, move to other sites. I agree that unchecked free speech is chaotic & dangerous. Moderation is important, one of the defining characteristics & something we have a lot of diverse different styles & systems for, that we are still learning from. Sites need to be able to host content, without being direct endorsers/directly responsible parties to that content, and they need to be able to say no to content. Without the first, nothing can be shared nor hosted without vast chilling & frighteningly costly & fragile/elaborate safeguards checking each & every word, and eithout the latter all places bece one big room for the very loudest to shout & dominate & control.
  - runeks 4y ago
    A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Exactly. This is clearly a content host, a site, eith userhgenerated content. Pretending that it's otherwise is a vast existential risk which would greatly greatly greatly limit human expression & creativity.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      They are clearly trying to carefully craft their offering. Albeit with automated tools. Thus I wouldn't separate them from being publishers. Now if they just handled DMCAs and court-orders I might accept some level of protections for them.
      - rektide 4y ago
        I would very very definitely separate them from publishers. Trying to put them back in the publisher camp because there need to be ways for users to find & get content, and hopefully good content, relevant to what they're looking for, in no way changes this They do accept plenty of dmca & court orders.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard. That is absolutely not reasonable: If YouTube cannot curate 720,000 hours of video a day, perhaps it shouldn't be accepting 720,000 hours of video a day. And perhaps, if it hired the staff to appropriately do so, it wouldn't be (part of) one of the most profitable companies on the planet. Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior. In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem that is apparently getting drastically worse every single day. And as a former library employee, I can absolutely tell you that libraries pay attention to each and every book that goes into their collections. And while libraries value speech of varying viewpoints, and often celebrates things like "banned books", they are also very rare to give home to outright defamation.

Under Australian law Google, Facebook etc. are considered publishers and publishers of defamatory content can be sued. This is not new and there are multiple precedences.

rektide 4y ago

I dont know how I feel about this case (seems like Youtube themselves understand they didnt move fast enough) but this idea that sites hosting user content are publishers is some truly evil modern backstabbing of the internet & what made it possible. It feels fantastic & absurd, a fictitious & inapplicable label or classification. This is a threat to basic freedom & if it erodes safe harbor protections it will have vast vast & terrifying chilling effects; online sites will have to radically scale back what they can offer the public. It's sad to think any random state can layer in whatever legal nightmare it might cobble together. Humanity shouldnt be so jointly bound to whatever deadweight amy random country cooks up.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
On the contrary, every other medium of publishing bears responsibility for its actions. You can sue a newspaper for publishing a defamatory editorial, why shouldn't you be able to sue YouTube for the same? The Internet is not magical or different, nor should it be above the law. The issue with national boundaries is simple: Companies have to respect the laws where they operate. When they choose to become multinational behemoths, they accept that cost. YouTube is free to not do business in Australia if it doesn't want to follow Australia's laws. But since they make billions of dollars doing business there, they presumably would rather follow the law, and try to pay off politicians to make the law favorable to their business.
- rektide 4y ago
  The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly. Australia has long had a troubling & distrubing relationship with the press & allowed the wealthy & powerful inordinate legal control over publishing. To apply the same brutal regulation on 98% of human expression & exchange is ignoble. The scope of what you propose to regulate here is so vastly vastly greater. This application of old, already unreasonable, anti-speech practices to modern telecommunications is derangement. You notably havent shown any recognition whatsoever of the idea of safe harbor. You've presented only a case for total & complete responsibility, given no outlet or done anything to begin to allow user-content to exist, and are charging these entities with complete responsibility. This is comedically unworkable & a farce, unfit for consideration, in a world when gigabytes cost cents per month & bandwidth is plentiful. These tubes can all just rot & serve only industry & empire if what you propose is allowed. Only one other country proposes such draconian levels of ultimate responsibity, and that country also funds & pays for hundreds of thousands of censors & moderators operating directly under the state.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    The fact that several major governments have come nearly unglued over outright fictions perpetrated across free speech enthusiast platforms suggests unchecked speech isn't an inherent good. And YouTube doesn't allow free speech. Without regulation, it allows speech as defined as acceptable to YouTube's business. Worse than both regulated speech and free speech is what bad laws like Section 230 ensure: Corporate speech.
    - throwbigdata 4y ago
      Double plus good goodthought, citizen!
    - rektide 4y ago
      This argumemtation is getting darker & weirder quickly. These are publishers... but you dont like that they have rights to not-host content? How is a publisher supposed to do publishing if they also cant tell users they wont host their content? The wbole point of a so called publisher is to exercise their coproate speech rights, which you seem to protest heavily against, & thatcs very confusing to me. That right to pick & discern is the biggest thing 230 does. As for corproate speech & it's dangers, sites have a right to identity, to shape & grow themselves in ways they think are fit & healthy. That freedom in no way encumbers your right to speech, it doesnt threaten anyone: we all have abundant options for getting our voices out for sharing. We shouldnt all have to listen to whomever wants to yell; free speech doesnt mean every place on the planet must let whomever in to yell as they please. I dont go to a Borders bookstore to get shouted at by religious fringe groups. Bookstores dont have to have copies of books on the shelf, of perhaps these same groups. These defenses are also "corporate speech", the right of Borders Books to maintain their business & shape it. The internet itself rarely cuts anyone off, almost exclusively only under direct legal need, so there's endless options still available; the protest that everywhere, every big site should have to host content seems abominable, uncivil. We have to rely on sites, and a diversity of sites, or perhaps someday more p2p/direct-publish syndication. When a site grow rotten & oppressive, we can & should go vote with our feet, move to other sites. I agree that unchecked free speech is chaotic & dangerous. Moderation is important, one of the defining characteristics & something we have a lot of diverse different styles & systems for, that we are still learning from. Sites need to be able to host content, without being direct endorsers/directly responsible parties to that content, and they need to be able to say no to content. Without the first, nothing can be shared nor hosted without vast chilling & frighteningly costly & fragile/elaborate safeguards checking each & every word, and eithout the latter all places bece one big room for the very loudest to shout & dominate & control.
- runeks 4y ago
  A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Exactly. This is clearly a content host, a site, eith userhgenerated content. Pretending that it's otherwise is a vast existential risk which would greatly greatly greatly limit human expression & creativity.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    They are clearly trying to carefully craft their offering. Albeit with automated tools. Thus I wouldn't separate them from being publishers. Now if they just handled DMCAs and court-orders I might accept some level of protections for them.
    - rektide 4y ago
      I would very very definitely separate them from publishers. Trying to put them back in the publisher camp because there need to be ways for users to find & get content, and hopefully good content, relevant to what they're looking for, in no way changes this They do accept plenty of dmca & court orders.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard. That is absolutely not reasonable: If YouTube cannot curate 720,000 hours of video a day, perhaps it shouldn't be accepting 720,000 hours of video a day. And perhaps, if it hired the staff to appropriately do so, it wouldn't be (part of) one of the most profitable companies on the planet. Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior. In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem that is apparently getting drastically worse every single day. And as a former library employee, I can absolutely tell you that libraries pay attention to each and every book that goes into their collections. And while libraries value speech of varying viewpoints, and often celebrates things like "banned books", they are also very rare to give home to outright defamation.