Slashdot Mirror
Europe, Free Speech, And The Internet
drdale writes "Declan McCullagh responds at CNET.com to a proposal by the Council of Europe to require Internet sites to publish replies by individuals whom the sites criticize. This would apply to all web sites, apparently, including blogs. Per McCullagh, the Council's proposals do not have the force of law, but often serve as the basis for new laws." Imagine the chilling effect if McCullagh's own politechbot and similar sites had to follow such rules.
I commented this late in the very-similar post from the other day, but I figured it was worth it again, now that this is recieving more attention.
The print incarnation of this rule has long been in force in Belgium, and it was funny, the local english-speaking magazine had to print a response by what is considered here to be a radical right-wing group (the Vlamms-Blok, more harmless than moderate republicans in the US, if you ask me); they printed the response, along with several articles sorrounding it (literally, on the page) about the introduction and severe abuse of the laws which mandate it, hence completely invalidating the response piece. They weren't even obligated to allow a re-response, it was great.
My real question is, though, how can something as widely defined as European online communication be expected to produce cases which can actually be enforced in court. What's to prevent me from using a US blogsite, or host my site on US servers? Nothing. There's nothing like Eurocrats speanding hideous quantities of time and money on something which proves useless by sheer virtue of its unenforcability.
Why would this have a chilling effect? It just ensures the powerfull and rich people can't bash and blaim poor people, without giving them a chance to defend themselve. Journalists have way too much power, and that power should be regulated so it isn't abused.
Is that almost anyone can publish. It's really simple, and fairly cheap. Laws like this are just silly.
Compagnies like Microsoft can bash linux as a file server or Java as a viable programming language and Sun and the OSS community can't do anything about it. With laws like these the truth can come out. It is a law of fairness. Not just the rich media have a voice anymore.
I'd love to see such fairness happen in North America.
This is already law for newspapers, and why would internet sites be held to a lesser standard?
And what is the alternative? Facing countless lawsuits? I think it would be less easy to sue someone if he already had to publish your clarification.
And it doesn't say you would have to delete your original or that you can't make sure everyone understands you were forced by law to publish the "clarification" and you still stand by your original report.
So if somebody has a web site that offends another person, that person gets to have his reply posted for a period on the web site. What, though, if the reply offends some third party? Does the third party get to have his reply to the reply posted on the original web site? What about a reply to that?
...only outlaws will make comments.
I can understand maybe if you're trying to come across as an "unbiased" news site, but to make even personal and overtly editorial sites comply with this would just be silly.
If they have to do it, they should make the responder host his own comments, and at the most make the original article include a link to the response. And even then, only for certain sites. To have to post the response on your own site it too much burden and would severely stiffle freedom of expression.
And if I posted an article on how great Linux is, would I have to give space to Microsoft for a rebuttal?
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Read the article and the draft. It looks like this would only apply to businesses. This would guarantee Joe Sixpack the right to respond to the European equivalent of CNN.com and have that reply posted.
I'm not concerned about this law, as I'm interested in letting people see the replies I get to anything I put online. Simply allowing comments on the article would take care of this.
I don't see it as chilling, especially since it only has to be there for 24 hours and you can just link to it.
It requires you to add a "Replies to our stories" link on your news site. Boo Hoo.
Hell, I can see this becoming a new source of revenue for geeks. Take blog software, make some cosmetic changes and market it as a "response administration system."
Authenticating the source of the replies could be handled by a login process, and news sites could automate the process of inserting a link to the "replies" section a hundred different ways.
I'm not worried. If people want to make fools of themselves by disagreeing with me, let them. Half the time the arguments against me just strengthen my point.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
This legislation is really silly. Even if this was ever needed in the past it was because the cost of publishing was a barrier to entry, so if a newspaper slagged you the cost to refute them would be too high to ever get your voice heard. However the beauty of internet is that the cost of entry is almost non-existent. After all, I'm spouting my opinions right here and now and it didn't cost me a penny.
However regardless of the medium I am against anything like this. Declan appropriately quotes the following from a related case tried in the US:
"the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."
Now there's a judge that's got it right. I firmly believe that in order to develop critical thinking you need to be exposed to all sides of an issue, even if many of them are biased or even just wrong. When exposed to multiple views an intelligent person will learn to be critical of what they read and make up their own mind, rather than inherit ideas from others. Thus choice leads to critical thinking and critical thinking negates the need for this type of legislation. This is also why I hold the admittedly unpopular opinion that even some writings classified as "hate" still shouldn't be regulated. These people betray their own ignorance as soon as they open their mouths, it's suppression of their opinions that lend them some sort of inexplicable "mystique." If their views were subject to logical debate in a public forum they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Anything that restricts the cacaphony of free speech is a barrier to learning, even when some of the voices are offensive or wrong.
No, it is not a dupe. This story is a follow-up to a previous one. The linked article is an on-line response to that which was previously covered. Follow ups are a part of good journalism.
I'm in the USA(where freedom of speech is violated quite often.) I don't know if European nations have a similar freedom, but it seems to me that this is a load of crap.
I shouldn't have to pay the bandwidth costs for someone else's opinion any more than they should have to pay them for mine. It violates my right to free speech if I have to spread their ideas and their right if they have to spread mine.
If this ever comes out in the states, I'll send so many replies to M$ that it won't even be funny. Then their legal team can find the loophole and I can use that same loophole on my own sites.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Politicians and media in the US live in a free haven from public backlash.
/. ers bash MS? Isn't that doing something about it?
Doesn't the public vote for politictians into or out of their job? How much more "public backlash" do you want?
Compagnies like Microsoft can bash linux as a file server or Java as a viable programming language and Sun and the OSS community can't do anything about it
Don't the vast majority of
With laws like these the truth can come out.
Or slanderous lies.
Not just the rich media have a voice anymore.
Its about posting something on a web site. You never had to be rich to post something on your own website. I can't see how this can be possibly be a rich/poor thing.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Imagine the chilling effect if companies can sue your for billions of dollars in damages if you say something bad about their trademark. All it might take is a single letter to scare you into taking down your entire web site. Of course, we already have that in the US.
The European proposal seems to amount to "if you are a news site (commercial or non-commercial), you have to put in a link to the person/company you write about if they ask you to". I fail to see the "chilling effect" in that. It seems to be a matter of simple journalistic ethics to do that anyway.
If we could eliminate product libel and many forms of trademark infringement lawsuits that have cropped up around web sites through such a simple requirement in the US, I think we should adopt it, too: it would seem to be a great way of ensuring that people can exercise their right to free speech without fear of being sued out of everything they own.
> Why would this have a chilling effect?
> It just ensures the powerfull and rich people
> can't bash and blaim poor people
What would happen is that the moment some little guy opened his mouth and printed even the slightest criticism of the wealthy or of a large corporation, they would receive an overwhelming ton of rebuttal that they would be 'required' to post.
Write in your blog that you hate your Ford, and you will find yourself with 100,000 words of pro-Ford verbiage -- from 100 paid Ford shills -- that you have to post. It would become nearly impossible to have an opinion about anything.
Look at it this way: The cost to the little guy of making even an extremely valid and fact-based criticism of any wealthy person or corporation would be so prohibitive that you just would say nothing.
It effectively gives every person and organization the power that Scientologists abuse all the time when they make an all-out assault on their critics. They crush them with their wealth and vastly greater resources than any individual. They then take the web site and turn it into a pro Scientology site.
In the French Revolutionary phrase "liberty, equality and fraternity", the equality means equal under the law. At the moment in most developed countries the rich, or those with media access, are a lot more equal than everybody else. Even if there are flaws in the proposed legislation, it does seek to address an inequity in free speech, which is that the rich, or the media-savvy, can make their free speech heard while the poor cannot. When the US Constitution was written, the range of most people's free speech was the size of the town square. Its drafters didn't imagine a world in which a lie could be spread everywhere in just a few minutes.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I'd just like to echo two blog posts I made, an initial comment and a clarification after seeing how excited people were getting about this.
Summarizing, despite the fact I have one of the most stringent definitions of censorship I know of, this doesn't fit as long as it remains as limited in scope as it actually is. There are a lot of ways to screw this up, but the actual proposal (which should have been linked in the Slashdot article!) actually manages to avoid the traps. As such, this can qualify as a bona-fide cultural difference without destroying the world.
Now, be sure you understand that my approval is fragile and the things that people are reading into the proposal, since they didn't RTFProposal, are indeed scary and it's heartening to see people responding to that. But the limited proposal as it stands is not really a threat, until it is expanded.
(If you are against it because you feel it will inevitably expand into unethical extremes, well, I'd say the odds of that are pretty decent too so I would definately respect that view of things.)
1) The article says that the proposed law was revised to cover ALL online media: "a March 2003 draft dropped the word 'professional' and intentionally covered all 'online media' of any type." Unless there are other exclusions elsewhere in the law, this means bloggers, slashdotters, everythingians, online newspapers and magazines, websites covering history, sites hosting PDFs of scientific articles, etc.
2) If this were passed, I'd expect to see bloggers, etc., reduce the number of specific people they criticized, just to avoid the "right" of reply. Otherwise, in an article that criticized numerous people, you'd end up with an unmanageable cascade of replies, replies to replies, replies to replies to replies.
3) The article says that the reply *can* be a link. Can the original author insist that it be a link, or can the responder require that the author post it on the original site?
4) (really a combination of 2 and 3) Does this mean that the mandated "right" to reply is endless? If I criticize someone on my site, and she makes me link to something on her site, does the presence of that article *on her site* then give me the "right" to reply? In other words, does her reply automatically confer on me the right to reply? How many steps are permitted? How many links will need to be posted on the original page?
5) Do groups have the "right" of reply, or does that just apply to individuals? If I criticize Microsoft, "the Linux community," the Democrats, the Republicans, Slashdot, Scientology, whatever, must I allow them to reply on my site? If I want to avoid triggering Bill Gates's "right" to reply, can I get around this by talking about "the senior leadership at Microsoft"?
6) This isn't mandating a "right to reply" anyway. You always have the right to reply. I just don't think you have the right to force me to publish certain things on my website, be those documents or links. I think free speech does just fine without that.
Wait a second. Your readers are still free not to read the comment of the one you critisized. People come to your site, see the link/article (link would be better in my humble opinion) where you clearly state in top that it is a rebuttal of the critisized party, and then you say: Pfff, I don't care, and go away.
Nobody forced you to read the rebuttal.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
A requirement like this would have a huge chilling effect on any individual who owns a domain name ("company") and wants to make an unpopular comment. Said individual would be forced to publish all the replies! You could easily make it unfeasible to say unpopular things with this regulation, if you were a dirigiste Eurocrat aimed at such a thing.
Remember, the victim isn't you, who knows how to operate a blog or a slash site. It's the guy who wants to publish a rant on geocities about his view that Rumsfeld is right and Chirac and Schroder should be impeached by their respective parliaments. Posting all replies by hand is highly impractical - which is the whole point from the Eurocrat's point of view, as it means that such inconvenient views won't be published.
(BTW: I don't support the Bush administration - just using this as an example of unpopular speech in Europe today.)
sulli
RTFJ.
He is factually wrong about Portugal, at least. This is law and custom for as long as I can remember. I think he is getting everything else wrong, but that is another matter.
These laws aren't about anonymous bloggers, but about those who really have the power to hurt a reputation: the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Bild, El Pais.
os trabalhos e os dias: http://zmoreira.net
Uh, what? How is having a response published akin to "forcing people to listen to others?" If you don't want to read the response, don't read it. If simply having a response published is "downright repugnant," then so is publishing the original criticism; so I guess by your argument all websites are "EVIL."
As of your Totalitarianism comment, which situation is more like a situation in which an "elite few" control the communication? One in which only people who have blogs are allowed to write, or one in which both bloggers and the people who are being blogged about (i.e. a SUPERSET of the first set) are allowed?
In short, you're an idiot.
For all that is wrong with the US, the US Constitution is one of its crowning achievements. This kind of nonsense is exactly why the first ammendment to the US Constitution is so important.
True freedom of speech includes the right not to speak on your behalf. The government cannot prevent you from issuing a rebuttal against my opinions, but it also cannot force me to be an outlet for such a rebuttal. If I make libelous statements about you then your only remedy should be to sue me and demand a retraction. Otherwise you have absolutely no right to force me to speak. None.
It's frightening that a large political body like the European Union does not have the same constitutional restrictions on its legislative powers as the United States. It keeps growing, while the member nations slowly lose their sovereignty.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Well then you are just as bad as the hatemonger. If he is inciting a riot that is one thing but somebody who is just standing on the corner shouting hate speech has the same right to be there as a person standing on the corner preaching religion. The 1st amendment freedom of expression does not say that you have to like or that it has to have a positive result.
I truly hope that you never run for office. People like you make me ill.