5 ms·

I don't know about anyone else, but for me this is a hard one; I'm really mixed on it. On the one hand, you'll get no arguments against free speech or in favo

I don't know about anyone else, but for me this is a hard one; I'm really mixed on it. On the one hand, you'll get no arguments against free speech or in favour of official censorship from me; go First Amendment, for sure. Likewise, it does not seem tenable to endorse the idea that someone who committed a crime can compel or mandate society to "forget" about it in all repositories of its institutional memory, including those which are created and maintained by private individuals in addition to governmental organisations. On the other hand, having known and watched people who were incarcerated and rehabilitated attempt to reintegrate into society and lead normal, law-abiding lives and find jobs and housing fail because of the prejudices that arise against them on the basis of their having been convicted of a felony or whatnot, I can definitely appreciate the spirit of this law. To me it seems absolutely imperative that criminals - up to and including those guilty of capital crimes - be given a new lease on life, contingent upon the terms of their sentencing. For the more conservative, law-and-order types among you who think this is a spineless bleeding-heart rant, I encourage you to contemplate for a moment what it's like to be in the shoes of someone who has committed a crime, experienced years or decades of imprisonment, whose will has been broken and whose remorse consumes them. As if they do not have enough of a burden to live with - and for far more criminals than you might think, it is a burden they excise with attempted suicide - society has conspired to ensure that it is so much more difficult for them to even meet the basic needs of livelihood. Or consider the case of innumerable teenagers in the US - like the infamous Genarlow Wilson case here in Georgia - that fall prey to the criminalisation of their consensual sexual activity by retarded, ass-backward state laws and then experience a lifetime of stigmatisation by being placed for the rest of their life on the sex offender registries with which the American polity is so obsessively fixated. My point is that the spirit of the law - that convicted criminals who have served their time have the right to be judged on their own terms subsequently without that cloud hanging over their head - deserves at least some intellectual consideration in this case. It certainly lends the issue some nuance that must be carefully weighed, even if you don't ultimately come down on the side of censorship. It's precisely these kinds of draconian stances on prisoners' and criminals' rights arising from an overzealous, fanatical jurisprudential self-concept that give the US the record and reputation of being rather backward among "First World" nations. The human dimensions of the criminal element must be taken into account; just because someone committed a crime does not mean they are not a human being and do not deserve your thoughts and your empathy.

jacquesm 17y ago
I think it very much depends on the kind of crime and the circumstances. Society has different rules for dealing with that on a 'gut' level than the standards of proof in court. So you'll get different responses from ordinary people than you get from the legal entities, and these things have a way of finding an outlet. Just like you can't stop filesharing you can't stop the sharing of basic facts, if it happened and someone wants to get the word out there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop that. And it has been like that for the last 15 years or so. I've got exactly one example where it ended differently, and someone managed to successfully remove something from the internet in a more or less permanent fashion, but it involved some pretty drastic measure.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
The problem is that this law -- like so much of the currently broken bits of IP law, like so much of the publishing business -- made a degree of sense before modern information technology came along. Now, however well-intentioned it may be, however real the problem may be -- and I agree, it's a real problem -- the law is completely broken. I don't think I can afford to have "mixed feelings" on this subject: The law has to be repealed, and its proponents have to try to come up with another answer. Here's a layperson's description of this German law (with the caveat that it comes from an extremely biased source): Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, noted that Germany's courts allow a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once they have served a prison term and a set period has expired. This is the twenty-first century. There is no longer any such thing as a "news report", as distinct from a "history book", a "personal letter", or even a "word-of-mouth rumor". There was once a time when you could define, fairly objectively, what a "news report" was -- let's try this definition: "a piece of communications designed to be delivered to thousands or millions of people within a time period less than a month" -- but now that time is over. That definition is now rubbish. Anything I type here, anything I say out loud near a blogger, anything I write that comes into view of someone else's digital camera can be captured and distributed to the entire world, in much less than one day, for a price too cheap to meter. Anything that appears on the Internet, even if it is buried inside a dry Ph.D. thesis on a single web server in a locked basement on an isolated Pacific island, is one well-placed retweet away from becoming a "news report". I wish I knew how else to solve the problem, but even if you believe that censorship was the answer before, it isn't any more. The German legal system is literally trying to enforce the world of 1984: One is legally required to delete or rewrite history after N years.

jacquesm 17y ago

I think it very much depends on the kind of crime and the circumstances. Society has different rules for dealing with that on a 'gut' level than the standards of proof in court. So you'll get different responses from ordinary people than you get from the legal entities, and these things have a way of finding an outlet. Just like you can't stop filesharing you can't stop the sharing of basic facts, if it happened and someone wants to get the word out there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop that. And it has been like that for the last 15 years or so. I've got exactly one example where it ended differently, and someone managed to successfully remove something from the internet in a more or less permanent fashion, but it involved some pretty drastic measure.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

The problem is that this law -- like so much of the currently broken bits of IP law, like so much of the publishing business -- made a degree of sense before modern information technology came along. Now, however well-intentioned it may be, however real the problem may be -- and I agree, it's a real problem -- the law is completely broken. I don't think I can afford to have "mixed feelings" on this subject: The law has to be repealed, and its proponents have to try to come up with another answer. Here's a layperson's description of this German law (with the caveat that it comes from an extremely biased source): Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, noted that Germany's courts allow a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once they have served a prison term and a set period has expired. This is the twenty-first century. There is no longer any such thing as a "news report", as distinct from a "history book", a "personal letter", or even a "word-of-mouth rumor". There was once a time when you could define, fairly objectively, what a "news report" was -- let's try this definition: "a piece of communications designed to be delivered to thousands or millions of people within a time period less than a month" -- but now that time is over. That definition is now rubbish. Anything I type here, anything I say out loud near a blogger, anything I write that comes into view of someone else's digital camera can be captured and distributed to the entire world, in much less than one day, for a price too cheap to meter. Anything that appears on the Internet, even if it is buried inside a dry Ph.D. thesis on a single web server in a locked basement on an isolated Pacific island, is one well-placed retweet away from becoming a "news report". I wish I knew how else to solve the problem, but even if you believe that censorship was the answer before, it isn't any more. The German legal system is literally trying to enforce the world of 1984: One is legally required to delete or rewrite history after N years.