Europe To Force Right of Reply On Internet Communication

David Buck writes "Today, the Council of Europe (an influential quasi-governmental body that drafts conventions and treaties) is to finalize a proposal that would force all Internet news organizations, moderated mailing lists and even web logs (blogs) to allow a right of response to any person or organization they criticize. This would mean that you would be required to post the responses as well as authenticate their origin and make the responses available for some period of time. This will likely have a chilling effect on Internet communication (at least in Europe)."

Comments

Jurisdictional problems

[salimma]

If I criticise SCO my Slashdot journal, and me being based in Europe, SCO demanded that I give them the right of reply, what does it entail?

A SCO rep could just reply on the journal entry, but how does the authentication work? Could I require him to PGP-sign his message? Or would it be irrelevant because Slashdot is not based in Europe?

Re:Jurisdictional problems

[Reziac]

But under this law, you'd be forced to print someone else's blunder. As someone else points out, what if that in turn causes a third party to claim that THEY need a rebuttal printed too? Where does it end??

Stupid flamewars among kiddies aside (man, would this law make THAT a mess), this could kill off every sort of user-opinion forum out there.

What if every time someone here posted a negative remark about M$, either in a comment or a journal, Slashdot was forced to post M$'s rebuttal? And then whoever they FUD'd gets to post a rebuttal, and so on...

Wouldn't be long before user forums and blogs either go underground, collaspe under the sheer weight, or become bland useless places where nothing controversial is ever discussed.

Perhaps including even this law.

Confused

[m00nun1t]

What I've never understood about laws like this is the location of the person vs. the location of the server.

Let's say I'm in Europe and my server is in the USA (pretty common I would guess). Whose laws am I subject to? And let's say I'm subject to European laws. They may be able to arrest me, but I would assume they have no legal right to force the ISP to remove my content.

Have there been any precedents around this sort of thing? And what country combination were those precedents?

Kazaa seems to be depending on this model - clients in the USA (and everywhere else, but USA is where the legal action is around Kazaa), staff in Australia, company & servers in Vanuatu. Maybe they are taking advantage of the confusion?

Man, and it was objective right up to the end...

[SubliminalLove]

What's up with this at the tail end of an otherwise relatively well-written essay?

Europe lacks a First Amendment and the respect for limited government, private property and free enterprise that America still enjoys.

Item 1: Of course they don't have the First Amendment. They don't have the Declaration of Independance or the Proclamation of Emancipation, either; the First Amendment is part of the American constitution. This intentionally emotion-provoking phrase intends to say "they don't have freedom of speech", which may be true in limited ways (I understand, for example, that Nazi references are regulated in Germany), but I've never heard of extreme censorship in Europe. Am I wrong? Is Europe secretly a band of neo-nazi fascist authoritarians? My bad...

Item 2: No respect for private property. Really? This reads like a third-grader's "your momma's so fat" joke; it seems like it's just there to try to make Europe seem bad, without any justifying context. Again, am I wrong? Did Europe turn Commie when I wasn't looking? I hate it when they do that...

Item 3: Free enterprise is disrespected by Europe too? Okay, I don't actually know anything about Europe on this one. If we let Microsoft to continue to operate a monopoly, let the RIAA run the music industry as an oligarchy, and let the oil industry run the government (all of which practices are extremely discouraging to "free enterprise" in that competition is made more difficult), we don't get to bitch about Europe.

Item 4: "... that America still enjoys". With the implication that in pursuit of respect for Free Speech, Respect For Small Government, and Respect For Free Enterprise, America is the shining star that all other nations should look to for inspiration. Get real; the states aren't any better at any of this than their peers in democracy. College kids don't get their life-savings yanked for producing search engines in free-speech respecting nations. America rocks; it's my favorite country by far. But don't go trying to make it sound like it's got all the problems licked, and if the rest of the world would just look at what we're doing over here...

Stop trying to cram pro-American sentimentalities down our throat. There were two pages of informative and interesting writing before that line, why'd you have to ruin it by trying to make America the moral of the story?

Sheesh...

Re:America seems really terrible...

[GMontag]

Europeans seem every bit as knowledgable of their various beurocracies and psuedo-government agencies as Americans know of parallel orgs here:
quote is on NRO

âoeMany Europeans know so little about the EU that the convention's debates would mean nothing to them. A poll taken for Britain's Foreign Office in 2001 discovered that a quarter of Britons did not know that their country was actually a member of the European Union, and 7% thought that the United States was in it. In Germany, a founder member of the Union whose serious papers devote acres of space to EU affairs, another recent poll found that 31% of the public had never heard of the European Commission, the EU's most important institution.â

Sorry for the second-hand refrence. It is from The Economist and I do not have a subscription :( More of Andrew Stuttaford's comments on the article here.

Re:why a chilling effect?

[Randolpho]

If I had mod points at the moment, I'd waste them all on your post. :)

I agree, this is probably the biggest reason why people are against it. "It will stifle free speech", they say, because "it will keep people from posting what they really feel if they have to deal with the consequences."

Exactly. You have to deal with the consequences. People in today's society (well, at least the U.S. for you foreign devils out there ;)) want to do what they want in a consequence-free environment.

Internet Publications Are Media, Not Communication

[reallocate]

Media is media. This won't have a "chilling effect" on Internet communications because any publically available Internet publication is not private communication, but a public medium. If a nation enforces right to reply in regard to media such as newspapers, radio and television, why should it not also enforce right to reply in other media?

Internet publications should not draw a pass simply because they use a different technology. Nor should weblogs, mailing lists, etc., expect an exemption because they are "personal" or often operated by only one person.

If you want what you say to be considered private communications, you wouldn't print it in a newspaper or broadcast it on radio or TV. Likewise, if you want what you write to be seen as private communications, don't put it on the Internet.

Nope

[jefu]

At least you only have to hyperlink to them.

No. The draft proposal says that a link is ok. It does not say that the person or organization that wants to provide a rebuttal needs to provide space for the reply. It looks to me like a statement like "Walpurgis Mart Sucks" could result in "Walpurgis Mart" requiring me to put up a 100 Mb response.

Even so, I do have a couple questions about links as required here.... If I link to someone's reply from a period (".")in my text, is that sufficient? How about linking from an image map? Or from some fancy javascript? Could my link be set up to popunder a 10 by 10 pixel window that looks like it originates from the people who dont like what I said and that refuses to close?

Enquiring minds and all that ....