Slashdot Mirror
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)."
I can still say anything I want. I can say slashdot sucks on my blog. All I have to do is give the slashdot editors a chance to put up a message on my blog that says "no we don't".
And if what they post on your website is libelous against someone else? Then this libelled third party sues you for posting libellous comments about them?
Or suppose in their response they say something nasty about a third party. Now of course the third party has a right to respond on your website, so they do, and now the first party has a right to respond to that, etc. You become moderator to a Usenet newsgroup. But a moderator with the government constantly breathing down his back. And God forbid that you should ever make a mistake and fail to post something on time or make an error in copying the post.
Freedom of speech and of the press includes the freedom to edit content, and therefore it includes the freedom to exclude as well as include whatever you want. Any curtailment of that freedom is a curtailment of the freedom of the press.
Let's take the European idea to the logical conclusion. If people have the right to reply in the same physical place (e.g. the website) as the criticism, then why not in the same article, why not right after the very sentence in which the criticism takes place? If it really is a fundamental right to reply in the same place and in a timely manner, then why shouldn't critics be obliged to let their targets know ahead of time what they are going to publish, so that their targets can prepare a reply thereby avoiding unfair damage to their reputation? And if people's ownership rights over their own reputation extends to the right to force a critic to include their own response in the same location and in a timely manner, then why does it not extend to the right to edit the very text that is critical? If the criticism is unfair, then its very existence has potential to unfairly damage the reputation of the target, and therefore the target should have the right to exercise editorial control. And what about a public speaker? What if someone gets up in front of an audience and says something critical of someone else? Maybe the target has the right to append a response and force the speaker to read their response. Why not? It would be nothing other than an exercise of their right to force the critic to host a response in the same place as the criticism and in a timely manner.
If that sounds wrong, then maybe the basic ideas underlying it are wrong. Maybe the target of a criticism does not have the right to force the critic to do anything to host their response.
The article has some good points, which are worth considering:
Article segment.
First, a right of reply penalizes an Internet speaker or publisher. It takes time to receive a reply, to edit it for space, and to verify that it actually came from the person being criticized. In many cases, the cost may be minimal, but in marginal cases, it is likely to stifle robust political discussion--which lies at the heart of a democracy.
Second, the proposal substitutes an unelected bureaucrat's judgment about what material is appropriate for a mailing list, a chatroom or a Web log for the judgment of the person who first created the resource.
End article segment.
If anything, this might make free speech *more* available, since anyone who says "wal-mart sucks" has a non-onerous way of placating wal-mart without having to take down the text that offended wal-mart.
I believe you are mistaken: as far as I can see, this additional requirement in no way cancels the right of a person to sue, e.g., for libel.
It is chilling for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, at the moment you begin to criticize someone or something, you put them in control, backed by the full authority of the law, of the content of your web site/blog/whatever.
Questions such as sufficient prominence (a reply on slashdot would be required to be modded to the same level as the original post), period of time, etc., would have the effect of making controversial speech too difficult to create and publish. Can you imagine getting a letter from Scientology ordering you to include their 100Gb response to your link to Xenu.net? Suppose the link code they demand you to post is some wildly contorted munge of obscure and proprietary server side code they know you don't (or can't) support.
The wiggle room in such a law is much greater than the wiggle room in voter testing laws which were used to prevent minorities from participating in government in the U.S. If such laws were not wisely shut down in the U.S. (we occaisonally get something right), I am quite certain Microsoft would have used them to shut down Slashdot long before now.
I have to say that I agree with you. It does seem like a limit on speech.