Slashdot Mirror
FInland Proposes Editorial Culpability for Web Content
Sandstorm writes "Electronic Frontier Finland ry has an interesting article about a proposed law in the Finnish parliament on liabilities in public communications. Among other alarming things, the proposed law would require all web publications to have an editor-in-chief, who would have a criminal responsibility for all material published in his publication. That would include discussion on web boards and force editors on sites like /. preview and censor all comments before displaying them."
A mall was bombed last year. (try googling for "Myyrmanni bomb") Several people got killed, including the bomber. It turned out that the bomber was active poster on several discussion forums. Some of these were crackpot forums, and one was for people interested in explosives. The moderator of the explosives forum got arrested, but was released afterwards.
Another point is that the Finnish telecom, (Sonera) got thoroughly blasted by an anonymous book first published on the web. The book seemed credible enough, and later a police investigation showed that the security department of Sonera had been scanning the e-mail and the phone calls of the employees, without their consent. Probably this was done by a pissed-off employee. However, a big company got in trouble because the net allowed fast spreading of the book, and there was no way to press the publisher.
The outcome is logical, as the politicians and voters do not understand the net. Large campaign financiers have an interest in regulating the net. Play with the fears of the people and get paid when you desperately need good press and money for the commercials.
I'm getting more and more ashamed for being Finnish.
Warning: rant ahead...
I'm getting fucking tired of all this "Orwellian" bullshit, and the ease with which people, of all political stripes throw that name around without any idea of what Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) actually thought.
The fact is that anyone who bothers to look at Orwell's writing can find an idea that they can applaud. For instance, Orwell was opposed to having India as a colony of the UK ("In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred millions Indians must live on the verge of starvation -- an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream"), but he did not believe India was capable of governing itself. He found Hitler personally appealing ("I have never been able to dislike Hitler... [he] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life [which is the attitude of] nearly all Western thought... certainly all 'progressive' thought."), using terms that were eerily similar to those in England and France who endorsed fascism. He thought that Britain should not get involved in war against Germany and advocated planning "illegal anti-war activities." However, as soon as Hitler and Stalin signed the non-aggression pact, he flip-flopped, accusing British anti-war intellectuals of "sabotage"; of having been "Europeanised"; of sneering at patriotism; of weakening the morale of the morale of the English people.
Politically, Orwell was a revolutionary Socialist. He advocated a Socialist revolution in England, and a violent one if that was required. He viewed Hitler's success as the proof of the superiority of the planned economy. He wrote, "It is not certain that Socialism is better than Capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike Capitalism, Socialism solves the problems of production and consumption. However Orwell thought that, while a classless society would be made, the monarchy would continue.
The worst part of Orwell's legacy is providing a new vocabulary for slippery-slope arguments. If ideas are to stand or fail based on their logically possible consequences, than there would be no ideas, because every idea is, ultimately against life itself, if it is taken far enough.
Of course, those who like to use language inspired by Orwell, often times prove that they never read Orwell. The prime example is "Big Brother", which is generally used to mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, and oppression in democratic disguise. Nothing could be further than Big Brother; in 1984 all of that was overt; there was no disguising it.
One gets the impression that Orwell's only objection to totalitarianism and propaganda was stylistic; that only because the language they use is ugly are they evil.
Um. If you take a closer look at the proposed law, you will see that it takes quite a lot to be qualified as a "web publication". USENET and any private message board maintained by an individual are not within the purpose or reach of this law. However, the definition of a "web publication" is faulty within the proposed law, and that should be re-examined before it actually becomes official.
What they are trying to do is to apply the same kind of rules to web-based publications as to print publication: if you are a company that publishes also on the internet, AND you allow people to discuss within your web page, you should keep track of what they say and apply some sort of filtering - much like what the current opinion sections in the newspapers are like.
Especially anonymous commenting allows all sorts of crap, personal abuse, etc. to appear on those sites, since not everyone has a slashdot-like moderation system.
There has been at least one court case in France where a webmaster was found guilty for having illegal speech on his website. The speech in question was located on a forum, and wasn't put there by the webmaster.
h p3 ?id_article=169p hp3?id_article=25 8
This effectively means that anybody who puts up an unmoderated forum in France is taking a chance.
It didn't require extra laws, and probably didn't make a lot of headlines, but it's a reality.
http://www.homo-numericus.bonidoo.net/article.p
http://vulgum.org/libre/article.