6 ms·

Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal conten

• themanr 13y ago
  > Mr Moore is said to have paid Mr Evens to hack into hundreds of victims' email accounts to obtain more nude photos to post on the website. I think this is what they are charging him for - not for hosting genuine UGC.
  • sillysaurus2 13y ago
    It is the latest legal setback for Mr Moore, who was ordered in March to pay $250,000 (£170,000) in damages for defamation resulting from a civil lawsuit. I may have misunderstood, but didn't this $250k fine originate largely due to the UGC on the website?
    • k-mcgrady 13y ago
      AFAIK users didn't actually upload content to the site. They submitted it and then Mr Moore or someone else posted it. I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't honour take down requests.
      • sokoloff 13y ago
        Is there a large chasm between "upload content" and "submit [content]"? Is the difference in the latter case just that someone clicks "ok, post this"? I don't think that a quality-review (or lesser, a mechanism to queue and release content to the site slowly over time) turns user-generated-content into site-generated-content. If Youtube did a quality review, it would still be UGC. If Youtube did a post-facto quality review (to remove copyrighted music), it would still be UGC. ... Not honoring takedown requests is a different matter, and just sounds like a dumb call.
        • bruceboughton 13y ago
          Yes, because then you are editorialising and lose a lot of safe harbour protections.
        • chilldream 13y ago
          Not a lawyer, but it seems like posting the content yourself could ruin a Section 230 defense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... Also, I'm not sure why a quality-review process would lessen culpability if all the illegal stuff gets through anyway.
• jamespo 13y ago
  You need to read the article more closely
• enimodas 13y ago
  http://jezebel.com/one-womans-dangerous-war-against-the-most-hated-man-on-1469240835 http://jezebel.com/one-womans-dangerous-war-against-the-most... this article explains how he was not just hosting a site for user-generated content, and some other difficulties with it. And hn comments on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6788203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6788203
• rmc 13y ago
  In the European Union storing personal data like that has been illegal for many years.
  • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    I think you miss the point. It may be illegal but nonetheless someone can upload your personal information to Flickr or a Google Hangout or a Facebook page. The question is whether that makes Facebook, say, culpable. Safe-harbour laws apply in USA, I don't think we have anything similar in my country.
• brown9-2 13y ago
  if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? Where are you getting the "reasonable steps" part from this story?
• onetwofiveten 13y ago
  Websites should be free to host user generated content provided they're not intending to host illegal content. Taking reasonable steps to remove illegal content is only part of that. If the illegal content hosting is the public premise of the site, then that's proof of intent. For me, the distinction is pretty clear. Reddit doesn't allow subreddits devoted to child porn, for example, and I think that's reasonable. I don't think laws should be applied retroactively, but normally they aren't, and that certainly isn't what happened in this case. The fine was related to a civil case, and the criminal proceedings seem to be related to hacking activity. Bear in mind that although revenge porn wasn't covered by criminal law until recently, it was always covered by civil law. These photographs count as copyrighted content. According to the Jezebel article, the website owner refused to take down photos even when issued with a DMCA takedown notices. As I understand it, that means the owner was breaking civil law. So it's not really fair to paint him as a law abiding but sketchy businessman. He broke the law, but he got away with it by targeting vulnerable people who didn't sue him because it would have been public, embarrassing and expensive. Revenge porn isn't a good thing, on balance. The freedom involved isn't worth the damage done, so I'd be happy for it to be illegal to host. However legislation on this has to be very carefully written to only target revenge porn. You wouldn't want someone getting put in jail for torrenting an amateur porn movie.
• bmelton 13y ago
  > On the other hand, this website was clearly vile. "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." H.L. Mencken
• bananashake 13y ago
  > That may be true, but remember that if you have the right to host whatever legal content you wish, then the first step toward losing that right is to not defend it. Sometimes that requires defending scoundrels. Making a UGC revenge porn site doesn't need to be defended by anyone. I feel like your comment is a troll. I shouldn't be arguing with a troll and I expect HN to not have them. I'll stop at that.
  • Silhouette 13y ago
    FWIW, I think you're being unduly harsh. I wonder whether you misunderstood a valid point made by sillysaurus2, specifically that there is an ends-vs-means issue here. I doubt anyone reading this comment would condone the operation of such a nasty site or have much sympathy for someone who ran one. Nevertheless, it is important to be clear about why we feel such behaviour is morally wrong and should be penalised. What principle(s) are being violated here? Our legal systems in the West tend to depend heavily on precedents, so the reasoning behind a judgement is in a very practical sense as important as the decision itself. Personally, I think much of this issue could be dealt with very clearly. I believe stronger privacy laws are long overdue in many contexts, and as one example, criminalising the collection or distribution of intimate imagery of another person without their explicit consent is appropriate. Combine that with the well-established legal concepts of attempting to commit a crime, being an accomplice, and incitement, and situations like revenge porn sites are black and white criminal offences as far as the original uploaders are concerned, and the usual legal means should be available to investigate sources and track down the offenders. There is a second issue here, which is more what I think sillysaurus2 was going after: should a site that hosts user-supplied content have any responsibility for the nature of that content? I don't think the answer to this is "pretty clearly no" in the way the GP post described, because one could certainly make a reasonable, logical argument for an alternative model where if you're going to publish potentially damaging information to a wide audience then you have some sort of due diligence obligation first. However, I don't personally think that would be the best model, because it would impose severe and possibly prohibitive burdens on many beneficial activities. I prefer a "common carrier" model, where merely conveying someone else's information does not in itself incur any liability if the service doing it has no knowledge of or control over that information. However, the rules about aiding and abetting/incitement should also apply, so if you run a site promoting illegal behaviour or you knowingly allow your site to be used for illegal activities without taking reasonable steps to try to prevent it, you're on the hook as well. Again, this makes operating a dedicated revenge porn site a black and white offence (actually, many black and white offences, for which the penalty should IMHO be correspondingly severe) but without necessarily imposing burdens on modern communications networks that would be harmful to the generally valuable function they serve.
• chilldream 13y ago
  This is but a handful of data points, but a lot of the rumblings I've heard about this whole trend have been coming from lawyers who take a specific interest in protecting free speech. This includes Marc Randazza, who was mentioned in the article. This also includes Ken White at Popehat, who has an entire tag devoted to IsAnybodyDown (a knockoff of Moore's site that added more crimes into the bargain). There's definite danger of a badly-drafted law going over the line, but it seems that it's possible to prevent the stalker-enabling crap on these sites without damaging actual speech.
  • makomk 13y ago
    Marc Randazza's gone further than that, he's actually argued in the past that sites should allowed to actively encourage people to post particular kinds of actionable and non-protected speech, specificially defamatory posts.[1] [1] http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=0&article=1572&context=historical&type=additional http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filena...
• zequel 13y ago
  Usually I agree with the whole slippery slope angle but I don't think you want to hang your legal hat on THIS case. Wait for a more redeeming party and case imo, there's value in having some sympathy for the defendant. These are the defendants you're looking for.
• drewcrawford 13y ago
  > Is it a worrying trend that website operators are becoming increasingly culpable for user content? Well, let's be clear here. He didn't build a business that operated around hosting arbitrary images, that happened to be adopted by bad people for bad purposes. He was a bad person himself, who built a bad website, to assist other bad people. These are two very different things. I mean, I understand how you could imagine some other website, a neutral website, that was unintentionally adopted by bad people for bad purposes, and that other website could do the same sort of damage, unintentionally, that this website did to its victims, intentionally, and that hypothetical situation is sort of similar to this one if you look upsidedown and squint. But in the moral code of most people (for example, mine) and for that matter the US legal system, it's important not just that you have bad effects, but that you have a bad intent. This is why, for example, murder is different than manslaughter. In both cases somebody is dead because of your actions, but in only one case did you form a specific intent to kill another person. (And manslaughter is, for the record, not "no intent", but it is a lesser kind of intent, like firing a gun into a building without regard for whether or not it is occupied. It's a bad intent, just not bad enough to be murder.) I think where hackers get hung up is in some sort of weird Net Neutrality-ish argument where any packet is as good as any other packet, and so a packet that carries revenge porn is just as legitimate as a packet that carries cat videos. Packets are neither good or bad but just are and all packets have the same legitimate claim on arriving to their destination as any other. And if you are designing a router, that sounds like a very sound principle to me. But in the courtroom, we are not prosecuting packets, but prosecuting people. And people are more than just a function of the packets they send. They have motives, they have intents. They construct a conscious plan to do good or to do evil. And that is how they are judged.
  • natdempk 13y ago
    This is going to sound kind of ridiculous, but I think a flaw with this viewpoint is that you're saying that a "revenge porn" site is inherently bad with bad effects and bad intent. For the sake of argument, I can imagine a scenario where an upcoming adult model submits "revenge" pictures that she took herself as a form of free publicity, or another popular revenge site that is actually run by an adult modeling company where all content is actually generated by them under the facade of being "revenge porn". Should this content be illegal? Should the site that the model submitted to be fined? What if all documentation was destroyed in the case of the second site, but it was just the state going after it? Do you trust a court of law to make these decisions accurately? These aren't easy questions, and this is why I have trouble with going after businesses that are morally suspect. It always seems to set a dangerous precedent for businesses that are on the edge or on the "moral" side of things.
• eco 13y ago
  > But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.com. Isn't this basically GrooveShark's business model?
  • rhino369 13y ago
    Grooveshark must have the best lawyers or the worst lawyers. I have no idea how it survived so long.
• FireBeyond 13y ago
  "if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence?" In this case, no steps were taken - though some claimed he was willing to remove content "for a fee". Usually, though, requesting content removal got you front page publicity, and the site sharing your content further with other similar sites. "if you have the right to host whatever legal content you wish" Said legal content is actually of fairly dubious legality when you pay someone to hack email accounts to get some of it.
• allochthon 13y ago
  That may be true, but remember that if you have the right to host whatever legal content you wish, then the first step toward losing that right is to not defend it. Sometimes that requires defending scoundrels. In my opinion, this is one area where the US legal system goes south. There must be a way to maintain people's legitimate right to freedom of speech that does not involve defending clearly scandalous behavior. I think people too easily buy into the lawyer's argument on this one.
  • Houshalter 13y ago
    It's a slippery slope. If you allow the government/courts to dictate what kinds of speech is "bad", then you are placing faith in the system that nothing not-bad will ever be seen as bad by the government/courts. The cost/risk of potentially losing freedom is perceived to be worse than stopping a few assholes saying bad things (which they probably will anyways.)