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Defamation, Free Speech, Jurisdiction and the Net?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm writing a legal article on jurisdiction and defamation via the web. There seems to be a trend in various national courts (eg the UK, Australia, Malaysia) to treat the place where a web-page is *read* (ie browsed) as the place of publication of its contents, regardless of where the page or the server serving it are located. This has far-reaching ramifications, as it opens up anyone publishing anything on a web-site (and also Usenet)
in America to the more restrictive domestic laws of other countries -- not just for slander/libel/defamation, but also treason, lese-majestie, hate speech and general censorship laws (think Yahoo and France). Does anyone have personal, practical experience of being threatened by foreign governments or government bodies for material put up on the Net? Or is it just an inevitable consequence, to be overcome by geographical tagging of a browser's location (think icravetv.com) or similar measures?"
"Many people assert that informed Netizens see this as a way of fragmenting the Net, of imposing geographic boundaries and destroying part of the fundamental location-agnostic nature of the web and the Net -- ie, that it's a Bad Thing. Is this really so? Does anyone see this as a good, or at least a neutral, thing?"
If they can't do anything about broadcast radio propaganda etc, why should they be able to claim jurisdiction over web traffic? The parallels are pretty close.
With WIPO and others creating interlocking treaties to enforce "intellectual property rights" across national borders, our own 1st Amendment rights may be increasingly threatened.
Things that we'd regard as valid speech may offend other governments or piss off multinational corporations -- I just hope they won't gain the leverage to suppress them across borders. Certainly in areas connected to copyrighted, trademarked and patented material, the big corporations are trying to gain global power to suppress speech they don't like.
I would be more afraid of the opposite, like encryption developers from, say, Norway, Australia, Russia or Finland, being applied doses of whoop-ass called DMCA (or perhaps even the far-reaching 'terrorism' laws mr. Asscrotch created)
This should read "as it opens up anyone publishing anything on a web-site (and also Usenet) to the more restrictive domestic laws of America". See DMCA for example (USA only).
Sigh. Why do so many Americans just blindly assume everyone else is behind. Yes, there are countries for which this is true. But there are also many for which the reverse is true.
So, to be more specific you could kill the "in America" in the sentence above and would even be more true: Also web pages on other countries could be subjected to more restrictive laws in again other countries.
Right? Yeah, I'll stop nitpicking now.
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I realize this may seem extreme/rude/harsh to some... however, nobody can forecast the laws that another country may decide to introduce. The web is open and free, and to be of any use it must continue to remain so. Like radio or telivision... if you don't like it, change the channel.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
where a web-page is *read* (ie browsed) as the place of publication of its contents, regardless of where the page or the server serving it are located.
It seems to me that it is an action carried out by the person doing the surfing. Much like an American going to Canada and trying to come back across with Cuban cigars. Is it the fault of the guy trying to smuggle in the goods, or of the Candadian government for allowing its own citizens and and visitors to buy the cigars?
Not that I favor net censorship. Yes, there is some nasty stuff out there. But you don't have to surf to it. You don't have to expose yourself to it. If you do so and get offended, who's responsiblity is it? Yours. Not the governments, not the person who put up the website. It's not like a billboard, where you will see it if you look in a general direction.
Yes, searches sometimes turn up (possibly) objectionable results, but that just means the searcher needs to learn how to refine searches.
Education, not restrictions.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
One of the noblest moments in human history was when settlers in the new America rose up to assert and defend their independence from the religious oppression that was endemic throughout Europe.
We now face a similar threat to freedom, with governments around the world asserting power to stifle free speech originating from other countries.
However, this time, guns simply won't work.
The call to arms that I espouse is for all internet users to adopt the weapons of anonymity and encryption.
For the sake of basic online human rights, I call on all netizens to familiarise themselves with all anonymising technologies, and for all people with development skills to create and improve such technologies.
One basic weapon is the anonymising proxy server. This allows people to use the web to publish opinions that cannot be traced to them personally (assuming of course the operator of the proxy server don't keep logs and make them available to various authorities worldwide).
But an even more potent weapon is the Free Network project at www.freenetproject.org. Freenet provides technology that allows freesites (similar to websites) to be published. The advantage of freesites is that they can't be traced to their author, since they are distributed at several points around the network. In fact, any attempt to locate the source of the information, or delete it, results in such information proliferating further around the net.
However, Freenet is just a taste of things to come. There's a whole new generation of stealth technologies emerging which will wrest the power of the internet out of the hands of governments and restore it to the common citizen. One such technology is the Invisible Internet Project (formerly called Invisible IRC Proxy), which will provide secure IP-level tunnelling, anonymising and encryption features.
People, please don't take these threats to your freedom lying down. If enough of us start using these new liberating technologies, we'll be too large a market for ISPs and governments to block us.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Suppose a kid, let's call him Jon, is sitting in a country, let's say Norway, and writes software that does something that pisses off somebody else, let's say the Motion Picture Association of America, because it does something like, oh, decrypts the content scrambling system on DVDs.
Now let's say this is perfectly legal in Norway but not in the MPAA's country, let's call it America.
Does this enable the MPAA to sue poor Jon for breaking a law that does not apply where he lives?
Of course, maybe this has no point because of course it is purely hypothetical, as I said...
America may well have the DMCA and the USA-Patriot Act, but it also has the ACLU, Alan Dershowitz, Johnny Cochrane, etc., etc.
In other words, we may have restrictive laws, but we also have a bunch of chiselers out to finess them.
Contract this with countries that
- like the former USSR, have great Constitutions in the abstract, and secret police to liquidate you if you attempt to exercise any "right" you may have.
- don't have Constitutions at all, just the will of the assorted ruling gerontocracies.
- have Constitutions, and strict laws derived therefrom, but with noting like the counter-balancing provided by, say, the ACLU
Things are strange right now in the U.S. There's change happening based on technology and terrorism and at such times over-reactions will occur. I have no doubt that things will free up in the next decade.
668: Neighbour of the Beast