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EU Bans Sock-Puppet Blogs
PhilipMarlowe9000 writes in with news of a new EU directive that will take effect in the UK at the end of this year to ban "sock-puppet" reviews or websites, part of an EU-wide overhaul of consumer laws. From the article: "Businesses that write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be created by customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from 'falsely representing oneself as a consumer.' From December 31, when the change becomes law in the UK, they can be named and shamed by trading standards or taken to court. The Times has learnt that the new regulations also will apply to authors who praise their own books under a fake identity on websites such as Amazon."
Please keep in mind that fraud is not generally protected speech, particularly when it relates to commercial speech.
I don't think it's really intended to catch every single abuse. It's intended that when a big scandal comes to light, like that "All I want for Xmas is a PSP" crap, the company gets in some legal trouble for it. (Although realistically, this probably just means that such companies won't 'fess up as easily.)
Slashdot has a significant population of, well, crazy Libertarian types. Hop over to any of the frequent global warming threads for evidence of this. Suggest that the free market doesn't solve all the problems in the world, or that some corporations might do bad things, and they react very badly.
The government should represent its people, and politicians should be held to very high standards. Legal bribery, or any other means of subverting our government are simply unacceptable, and should be considered no less seriously than premeditated murder. In fact, as the current administration demonstrates, it is often much worse.
This is an EU political story that does not belong on slashdot at all.
True it has been mislabeled and doesn't belong in the 'Politics' section however the FAQ also says
This looks like an interesting story, which is technology related. It probably won't cause too much psychic distress, even for US residents, to keep informed about how the internet is being regulated in other jurisdicitions.
See this is the problem when you put a site up on the big bad internet --you are publishing internationally and your audience will be an international one (unless you have specifically restricted access). What's more some of these nasty foreigners will have the impertinence to answer back via commenting mechanisms or, horror of horrors, to submit content. So deal with it! ... or if you don't want to, just skip over the stories you have no interest in reading ... works for me!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Either speech is free or it isn't, no matter what convenient label you want to put it under.
That's an easy position to take, because it is the expression of an ideal. In the real world, rights clash all the time. The rights of Individual A, when they come into conflict with those of Individual B, or of society at large, can't be absolute.
My right to defend myself does not give me the right to shoot someone in the head when they try to pick my pocket. My right to own property doesn't mean that I can drill down and inject anthrax into the groundwater. My right of free speech doesn't mean that I can spam millions of email users without consequence. It also doesn't mean that I can advertise Fruit Loops cereal as a cure for cancer. In Abstract World it sounds great to let the buyer beware, but just imagine how much of a drag that would be on society. Transaction costs would go up, because much more due dilligence would need to be done, just to conduct a simple purchase. Those with more free time and more resources would be able to conduct due dilligence. Everyone else would be put at a substantial disadvantage. That's a perversion of free speech, which is designed to protect political speech, not the fleecing of other citizens.
As a side note, your slippery slope argument may apply in some countries, but not in the United States.I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in the United States, commercial speech has been granted more 1st Amendment protection over the past few decades, not less.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Should a drug manufacturer be able to advertise their product as a cure for everything from cancer to AIDS, even if the pill is nothing but sugar? Should they be allowed to air a television commercial on Fox news that looks just like a Fox news report about what a miracle this drug is? Or, should this company be allowed to use the same tactics to claim their competitors products have horrible (and completely made-up) side effects?
This is not about freedom of the press or individual expression. It's about keeping advertisers in check, to make sure their products do exactly what they claim- and to keep them from slandering their competitors with complete untruths. There's a good reason these laws exist; they didn't for the much of the twentieth and most of the nineteenth centuries and advertisers lied, fought dirty, made impossible claims, bought articles in the newspapers and laughed all the way to the bank. A reasonable amount of consumer protection is something a society should expect from their government, because the alternative is never knowing if that pill was tested, or what exactly is in that package of food...
There is no "slippery slope" where protecting you from corporate snake-oil salesmen will take away your personal freedom to express your opinion. This law regulates commerce, not speech.
sorry but you are wrong. legal persons exist eu-wide, and it is even distinguished between legal persons of public law (the state itself, its municipalities, public universities etc) and legal persons of private law (private charities, corporations etc).
in germany there even exist so a called quasi-legal person. it is a business partnership (kommanditengesellschaft, offene handelsgesellschaft) which is not a real legal person but still meets a definition of a person (a person is defined as bearer of rights and obligations).
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Corporate personhood is a term used to describe the legal fiction used within United States law that a corporation, under the concept of legal entity, has a limited subset of the same constitutional rights as a human being
Here in the EU, there is a very clear distinction between a person and a company.
Companies are considered people because this enables them to limit their financial liability and encourages their directors to take greater risks.
In what way does that require the corporation to be a person? Surely it's just as easy for the law to say "directors and other employees of corporations are protected from personal financial liability in the event of corporate financial liability" as it is to say "corporations are people"? The former, while possibly becoming a long list, limits the protection and rights to exactly what they need to be. The latter potentially opens up all sorts of problems.
To draw an analogy to computing (yes, I realise that's the wrong way...), when setting up a firewall you don't allow all except known bad stuff, you block all except known good stuff. It's a little more work, but a damn sight safer in the long run.
Treating corporations as people is a shortcut that leads to all sorts of potential abuses and excesses. It's not even as though your country has a shortage of people able and willing to sit down and thrash out the details of a saner law...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
When a new law is written and put into action, people's debate center around two opposing opinions: is it good, or is it bad.
/for example/ face public humiliation and mockery before they decide that this wasn't a good idea to begin with?
Granted, every law can be bad or good, but we're missing the big picture. Have you seen the proposed European consitution? The Bible's both testaments are nothing compared to it.
Every time you put a law about something, you need to be really friggin sure that the right solution is *legal*. Otherwise we end up in a system so complicated and flawed (every law is imperfect, you know this), that nobody understands it at all, and the rules are so many and in many cases conflicting with each other, that the only way to apply them is selectively and "with a spin", depending on the lawyer/prosecutor/citizen bias.
We all fall pray to lawyers and the juridical system setting traps for us on every step to doing something.
Should fake blogs and reviews be banned? They shouldn't be encouraged, but a law is excessive. I mean, how many times should Sony
Fake marketing right now is, in most instances, easily recognizable. If we decide to patch the situation with a bunch of "moral" and "smart" laws, then the corporations in question will just get stealthier, and hire few more lawyers to let them workaround the law.
In the end, we gain nothing, except more complexity, and more lawyers. Great.