Slashdot Mirror
Online "Public" Spaces Don't Guarantee Rights
mikesd81 recommends an AP piece covering a lot of examples of the ways free speech and other rights don't exist on the private Web. One case featured was that of Dutch photographer Maarten Dors, who had this picture deleted by flickr. Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. While Dors eventually got the photo restored, after the second time it was deleted, the case highlights the consequence of having online commons controlled by private corporations. "Rules aren't always clear, enforcement is inconsistent, and users can find content removed or accounts terminated without a hearing. Appeals are solely at the service provider's discretion. Users get caught in the crossfire as hundreds of individual service representatives apply their own interpretations of corporate policies, sometimes imposing personal agendas or misreading guidelines. First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child." Reason.com has some more analysis on the issues brought up by the AP story.
Next you know, someone is going to tell me I can't have free speech in someone else's home!
If I can't go into random people's houses, and in privately owned property and say what I want, you are oppressing me!!!
Libertarians seem to forget or blithly ignore that the government is not the only means of restricting your rights. For the vast majority of US history, corporations have been bigger threats to individual rights.
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Flickr isn't a public place. It's a private place they let other people use. You agree to their terms when you use the site. They can remove content they don't find appropriate.
It's private property. Your rights to do what you want have always been limited on private property. If you want to have free speech online, get your own damn website or find a site that's willing to tolerate whatever you have to say.
These spaces aren't public-they're paid for with private money by private companies (or their shareholders). Why is there a feeling of wrong doing here? They can do whatever they want with their own servers and websites.
Your timing is impeccable, but your logic is flawed. So you think YOU should be able to tell them how to run their business? Or do you think the government should take care of that for you?
This is their property, they have a right to determine what is appropriate for them and what is not. If they suck and censor stuff that doesn't make sense, they go out of business.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Of course other people should be able to control how others make use of their property. Nobody's denying that. The question is: where can you exercise your right to free speech in the Internet, without being subject to others' right to control how you make use of their property?
In real life, there exist spaces that are clearly public. In the Internet, there aren't any obvious ones. Even if you try to set up your own site, the various providers may censor you if they choose to do so.
Are you adequate?
Yeah, and for 6 years when I was moved to the southeast with my family in the early 90's, we rented a house.
Maybe they should be allowed to put riders in my rental contract saying I can't campaign for my local green party, or post signs in the yard detailing exactly why supply side economics is flawed?
How long do you think that would fly in court.
There's a reason the federal government stared suing private citizens/businesses for violating people's constitutional rights in the late 60's.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Citation needed. When has that ever happened.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Free speech (within the United States) applies to government muzzles - it has never and should never apply to private areas that the public uses. Just as I have no guaranteed right to free speech in a mall, movie theatre, or someone's front yard, the same applies to online spaces. I'm a little puzzled why people would have legitimate reason to think that online freedom of speech would be guaranteed. They did read the ToS when they created the accounts, yes? (Yes, I know the answer to that question.)
Don't like the ToS? Then don't use the service. Ask the provider to fix the problems. But don't complain about "rights" being non-existent. The services being used are created and paid for by _someone_ - that someone gets to set the rules.
Part of what is great about an open web is that there is a very low bar to entry for people (at least those in first world countries, which the article primarily deals with) to create their own services and sites (limited only be laws). Most of the cases being cited are either free or very low fee sites. It's unrealistic to expect a lot of handholding and hands-on care if you're paying $10/year for photo hosting. If your artistic statement of kids smoking is so important that you have to make it, pony up for a web site someplace. If it's not important enough to the artist to pay $20-100/year for a cheap account why would a corporation be expected to pay the same amount in support costs on the user's behalf?
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property. You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
If I happened to be over at your house and started spewing stuff that you find offensive, you're well within your rights to ask me to leave or not to let me in in the first place. Or are you saying that I can drop by your house at any time I wish, and start telling obscene jokes to your wife? I mean, if you don't, you're censoring my free speech, right? You wouldn't want to sound like a "reaganite", would you?
I'm not even a "reaganite", I'm a western european socialist, if you must put a label on me, but even I'm... amazed at the idiots who think that screaming "first amendment" gives them essentially rights over someone else or their private property. Get this: freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is forced to listen to you, nor that anyone else must help you spread it. Freedom of press applies to whoever owns the press. That's it. It means that if you have a newspaper (or in modern days a server), the government can't come tell you to remove an anti-Bush column. No more.
It does _not_ mean that you can force anyone to listen. It does _not_ mean you have rights over someone else's newspaper. It does _not_ mean that they must give you a page to spew your speech on.
In short, it doesn't grant you power over anyone. It just says that the government can't have certain powers over you.
In other words, it does _not_ mean I can come over and tell you, "OK, I wrote this rant, you must put it on your blog."
Or if you don't find anything wrong with that, then put your wallet where your mouth is, and provide such an uncensored server for others. That's freedom of the press. You're free to do that. But just demanding that someone _else_ has some duty to provide you with free stuff, is just lame.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dude, the kid in the pic was smoking a cigarette, not a pole.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Yes, but that all was only needed in the first place because of prior government restrictions. In a truly free market, people wouldn't have to pay taxes, there would be no patents, copyright, etc. In those conditions racism, sexism, and etc. don't fly. We would also have virtually 0 monopolies, and some things would progress at a faster rate.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'd actually be surprised if your lease didn't say you weren't allowed to post signs without approval, as that's a pretty standard clause is leases. Moreover I suspect that your landlord is allowed to post signs (or at least certain kinds of signs) on the property without your consent.
As for your right to campaign, your landlord can and probably does place reasonable restrictions on that. For example, you wouldn't be allowed to run a campaign headquarters that admitted the general public, employees, or large numbers of volunteers. And you probably can't post signs. But your landlord's rights only extend with respect to the property and its use, and clauses to forbid you from running a calling campaign from your home, or from posting signs on other property would be unenforceable.
The government has only worked to counteract (or enforce, depending on your point of view) discrimination on a very specific set of conditions defined by recent statues, and specifically not the constitution or its amendments. And even in that respect the reach of the government is limited to places that claim to be open to the general public -- requiring registration and refusing to take government money is enough to make you a "private club" and circumvent most government interference.
The problem with your analysis, the way I see it (which might not line up with current law in any way, shape or form), is that it fails to recognize that corporations are fundamentally composed of people. Slashdot commentators like to reduce corporations to fancy names like Artificial Legal Entity, but those entities are created to provide some organization to the collective exercise of natural rights by groups of real people (shareholders, management, and employees - ok, mostly management, but management are people too. . .).
If I am the owner (shareholder) of a corporation, and I operate servers, I have the right to freedom of speech (and freedom of the press, which is basically just an aspect of freedom of speech, ultimately) with regards to the content I do or do not choose to host on my servers. The government should not be able to compel speech - freedom of speech also implies the freedom not to speak, not to be compelled to say something I choose not to.
Of course, with regards to services like Flikr, this raises thorny questions of liability - to whit, to what extent should Flikr be held liable for the content it hosts. After all, if the corporation Flikr wants to argue that it should have the right to take down images it does not agree with, based on freedom of speech, then it is essentially claiming that the content hosted by it represent *it's own* speech, and not the speech of others which it is merely a hosting infrastructure for - that's the real problem, that corps want to have their cake and eat it too - in one court, claim they can suppress speech they disagree with, and in another court, arguing they shouldn't be held liable for illegal content (e.g. kiddie porn, copyrighted images which weren't uploaded with the owners' permission, etc) which people might try to upload to their servers.
If you want to put up an image, article, or movie, which some corporation won't host for you, maybe you need to think about getting your own server. That still leaves the possibility of getting cut off by your ISP, but that's where contract law comes in (service agreements, where if you made sure the contract you were signing wasn't all screwed up, you can sue them for breech of contract if they cut you off) and where you can take more action to protect your own rights. With free services, the terms are never going to be fair to you. With services you actually pay for, you can negotiate terms which don't screw you.
The only real response I can find to this is to quote Foucault's Pendulum at you:
...
"Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefor cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians."
"Which they are."
"Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason."
"In such statements you suspect that something is wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism."
Everything is subjective.
I have to say Flickr is by far one the most disappointing experiences I have had online.
...my Flickr account
I am a professional photographer who uses Flickr as a means to promote my craft. I have even paid for a "pro" account to ensure consistency. Well, Flickr not only has taken censorship into their own hands, but have ZERO support for asking why and when and how to correct the situation. I have an account where I moderate my own material and have done it very well. BUT somewhere along the lines something happened and Flickr has made my account inaccessible for non-Flickr members and hard for even Flickr members to view. I tried to contact them through normal email channels many, many times with zero results and even rude replies from a moderator named "Terrence". I then went the phone method with Yahoo(their parent) only to find Flickr offers no support other than online, which has proven useless.
I have now lost noticeable business and online presence because of this, and all I was looking for was a little help. I have even thought to take Flick to small claims court for not only my membership price(which they refuse to refund) but also the time wasted and lost income. I also have fellow photographers who have lost their entire Flickr archive due to Flickrs weird self censorship.
I wonder how many people this has happened to. Now this article appears to show I am not the only one.
--tomjulio.com
They are renting you the photo hosting for the advertising traffic.
It's no different than leasing someone a car (to bring up the famous slashdot car analogy).
Yeah, no difference, other than the whole "completely different" part. When you rent a car, you sign a contract. It probably stipulates, for example, that you can't paint it a different color, or damage it.
The completely different contract that you agree to when you opt to participate in the activities on the private system that is Flickr, also stipulates that you can't damage that system. Using it to exhibit material that's outside of the boundaries they've established puts you in breach of the agreement YOU made with them, and they're certainly welcome to decide what is considered damaging to the business they're running - as they explain in the terms to which you agree before you can use the system. Is the problem here that you don't actually understand what it means to agree to a contract with another party?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I think the story is more that people are coming to realize that there is no true public space on the Internet, just private spaces masquerading as public.
I fail to understand why there shouldn't be rights that protect free speech in companies.
You have a company. You hire a salesman to go out and demonstrate your product. The salesman offends your customers by constantly telling crude sex jokes to them, while he shows your product. Is it his right to say whatever he wants? After all, it's free speech and legal.
You own a preschool. The teacher tells the kids all about her sexual exploits the night before. Is it her right to do that? It's free speech, after all.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The price your paying to live there is based on those conditions, if you want to changes those conditions argue with the landlord before you sign the lease or buy your own land and build your own house.
They have the right to impose those conditions as long as they do so before hand, thus giving you the right to accept or reject them.
If you're on someone's land, even if you're paying them for the use of it, you are not free, period. They dictate your life.
Yeah, until you simply buy your own, like they did. Or, in the case of web sites - which, unlike real estate, are vastly less expensive - you build and host your own. You seem determined to complain about everything, but don't mention that little detail: that just like Yahoo did, you can persuade people that you've got a good idea, and can attract the funds it takes to set up shop the way YOU want to... or you can use your own cash. Either way.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
However, using said power to (effectively) end-run the Constitution is just covering up tyranny. Using libertarianism to defend it only makes it more obvious.
There comes a point where The Unquestionable Market fails. When a private entity is able to exert influence by means nearly identical to censorship, the balance has been lost. That is, you've given too much power to entities that censor and use "private entity" as a shield.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Agreed. In a truly free market, most submarkets would quickly devolve into monopolies that would then abuse their monopoly power to ensure that no newcomers could enter the market either by flooding the market with goods at a loss until the newcomer went bankrupt or by using extra money to exhaust crucial resources from the newcomers' suppliers, ensuring that they could not obtain enough of those resources to meet demands. This, of course, assumes that there are still laws preventing what would be the obvious tools of a truly free market---knocking off their competition (assassinations), burning down their competitor's corporate headquarters/manufacturing facilities, stealing their competitor's physical assets, bribing banks/bankers to not give loans to their competitor, threatening businesses that distribute the competitor's product with pulling all of their most popular products (including products their competitor does not make) if the distributors don't drop all of their competitor's products, etc.
The promise of a free market as the solution to the world's ills is a fanciful notion that fools many who have never experienced anything resembling a free market. Those who have experienced it, however, immediately see right through such foolishness. Entrenched monopolies are hard to get rid of even with controls on monopolies. Without those controls, they become unstoppable rather rapidly.
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A corporation, by definition is an Artificial Legal Entity ( ALE ). Which means, that is is CREATED not by Natural Persons, but by another Artificial Entity. ( The State )
Error in the first step.
A corporation is not created by the state. It is created by private citizens, who then register it with the state, where they pay taxes in order for the unmolested privilege of selling to residents of the state and providing a form of accreditation for third parties to verify against.
At no point does the corporation become an arm of the state or an agent of the government.
So, we have a situation where the "rights" of an Artificial Legal Entity are *EXACTLY* what the Secretary of State's office
No. The "rights" of a corporation are those granted to them by the state's business and professions code, its labor laws, and relevant legislation, granted, interestingly enough, by the legislature, which is composed of citizens. The Secretary of State is not legally endowed with the power to grant or deny rights.
>In a truly free market, most submarkets would quickly devolve into monopolies
And you know this how? You thought really really really hard about it? Given how wrong you are in everything else you wrote, I'm just going to safely dismiss this point as well.
>..knocking off their competition (assassinations), burning down their competitor's corporate headquarters/manufacturing facilities, stealing their competitor's physical assets
I think you're channeling the conflict resolution strategies of past (and current) governments. This has not been the route that business have took, and there's no reason to think that this would be different in any another scenario.
You're also forgetting that businesses, large and small, have no qualms about cooperating with each other, even if they are competitors. Microsoft and HP might fight for the same enterprise market (Windows Server vs. HP-UX), but at the same time can partner in consumer space and relase jointly developed products. Hell, my father works for a medium size frozen food operation, that sells their own branded TV dinners, but also takes contracts from Nestle and various Grocery chains to make their branded dinners. You see similar co-operation in every segment of economy, from automative, to manufacturing, to sofware. None of it is government mandated. None of it is coercive. In the financial sector there are billions of dollars transferred amongst parties based on nothing more than a handshake agreement(and of course, dacades of built-up trust). Has this kind of uncoercive trust been seen at this scale during any other time in human history?
You are absolutely wrong in your characterization of capitalism and the free market. Looking at it anther way. The US GDP is approximately $13 trillion dollars. There are not enough regulators and auditors in the entire world to monitor even a small fraction of transactions that make up such a staggering GDP. If even a small minority of businesses behaved in the way you caricatured them, the economy would not function and would collapse. It clearly hasn't.
I think I prefer censorship, conducted under public scrutiny, to any idiot with an agenda being able to whip up chaos.
You don't fight bad speech by censoring it you fight it with good speech.
Not that the US doesn't have censorship - for all intents and purposes, if Walmart won't carry your work you've been censored.
Funny, I buy most of my books and magazines, the ones I don't subscribe to, at Barnes and Noble though I also order books from Amazon. And if B&N doesn't have it and won't order it, which I've never had them do, I can go to Borders or another store. I don't recall ever buying a book at Walmart. And as for the First Amendment, it only restricts government from censorship, not businesses.
eBay forcing PayPal in Australia, which was ruled a monopoly action but probably would have happened in the US
eBay could lose a lot of customers. Some sellers only accept certain forms of payment, like VISA. Amazon would love to take some of eBay's customers. As would Yahoo!. My sister both buys and sells on eBay and I bet she'd switch in a heart beat if she had to use a payment system she didn't want to use. Ah, competition.
Whose rights, whose laws, do we respect on the Internet? Should the rest of the world be forced to respect America's laws when America isn't willing to do the same?
You follow the laws of the country you're in when you connect, unless you're willing to pay the price.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Plasmacutter is a Communist.
After reading his posts, you can clearly see that he believes in equality at the lowest common denominator. But hey, misery *loves* company! The Chinese and Russians have learned this, why hasn't he?
No sane and rational person would advocate the abolishment of private property rights. But those that do are fools.
Life is not for the lazy.
Your justification of this fact is baseless claims. In the real world, I posit this never happens.
Citation needed.