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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?"
So if 2/3 of the population belives it's okay to lynch African Americans or execute homosexuals, that's okay, right? Not only would you support the law, but you'd condemn the 1/3 of the population who opposes the murder of minorities, because they're "disrespecting the will of the majority"?
There's a name for people like you: it's "Nazi," or "bigot," or "hatemonger," or even more simply, "monster."
A monster is what you are.
And to correct the gaps in your historical education, let me just point out to you that the First Ammendment was not added to the Constitution through the Constitution's process of Constitutional ammendment. It was in the very first ratified version of the constitution. It wasn't in the first draft, but the first draft was never ratified.
Also for your historical information, the first ammendment didn't grant freedom of speech, it only acknowledged that people always had, and always will have, free speech and that the government intended to respect the right that already existed. Free speech was originally granted (if you swing that way) by God(s)/Goddess(es), or (if you don't swing that way) by Nature, or by the Human Condition, or by Rationality, or whatever you happen to believe in. No matter what you believe, you had the right to Free Speech ever since the creation and/or evolution of the human race, and all the United States Constitution does is acknowledge that right, it doesn't claim to grant it, because you can't give someone something they already have, all you can do is acknowledge that they have it and you're not going to try to take it away from them.
Democracy is great, and I support Democracy, but I support CONSTITUTIONAL Democracy, where the absolute rights every person has been born with since the inception of the human race are acknowledged and protected by the Constitution and not subject to oppression by popular opinion.
Let popular opinion decide anything it wants as long as the majority doesn't try to violate the inborn rights of a single person.
You probably wouldn't understand the whole "freedom" concept. Monster.
This reminds me of a Libertarian bumper sticker. It says: "I'm Pro-Choice on EVERYTHING."
Are YOU Pro-Choice?
If you don't want people driving past your house at 100mph, live on a street owned by a person who has values similar to your own, and who'll set a speed limit on his street.
If you do want people driving past your house at 100mph, or you want to drive at 100mph down the street amongst people who share your passion for driving quickly through residential areas, live on a street owned by someone who has values similar to your own, and who won't enforce a speed limit on the street.
Under my system, you have choice, and you can live in whichever environment suits your personal tastes
Under your system, you only have one option, the one option that "they" decide is the right option for you. How do they decide what's best for you?
If you don't want explosives in your apartment building, rent an apartment where the rules don't allow explosives, and where the landlord has similar values to your own.
If you do want explosives in your apartment, or wish to create explosives yourself and share your hobby with other like-minded people, rent an apartment where the rules do allow explosives, and where the landlord has similar values to your own.
Under my system, you have choice, and you can live in whichever environment suits your personal tastes.
Under your system, you only have one option, the one option that "they" decide is the right option for you. How do they decide what's best for you?
Now, since there are very few people who want to drive 100mph through a residential area, there will probably wind up being very few street owners who are members of that group, and hence very few streets that allow driving 100mph. But those who do want to drive 100mph through a residential area can buy their own streets and build houses on those streets, and sell those houses to other people who want to drive 100mph through a residential area, and then they can do so and not jeapordize anyone except each other. All the people in the area will have moved there knowing the risks -- in fact they'll have moved there because of the risks, since the street was founded on the idea of driving 100mph through a residential area.
They're doing their own thing on their own property, and anybody who has a problem with it doesn't live there.
Similarly, those with a passion for explosives can build their own apartments a safe distance away from anyone else, and rent those apartments to like-minded people, and build all the explosives they want (I admit, they should probably be restricted to explosives with a blast radius smaller than the distance to the nearest person who isn't an explosives freak), putting nobody at risk except themselves, because they knew the risks -- in fact, they moved into the apartment because of the risks, because it was the only place where they could build explosives.
Most likely, the people in the above two groups, in a Libertarian society, would exterminate themselves out of the gene pool within a few generations. In a fascist state, people are forbidden from doing dangerously stupid things, but some of them do them anyway, and people die. The people who don't do them pass their stupidity down to future generations (surely your mother and father must be familiar with this concept). In a Libertarian society, stupid people can do dangerously stupid things only when they're in an environment where their dangerously stupid stunts can only kill themselves or other dangerously stupid people. Thus, the dangerously stupid people will kill themselves and each other, but no innocent people, and dangerous stupidity will be bred out of the gene pool.
Why do you hate choice?