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The CDA Is Dead, But States Are Trying To Revive It
oliphaunt writes "This week at The Legality, Tracy Frazier has an article discussing the damage that can be done by anonymous online comments. While regulars here are familiar with infamous bits of Net censorship like the Fishman Affidavit fiasco, and everyone has been an anonymous coward at least once or twice, some of you may not know about the conflict between Heide Iravani and AutoAdmit.com. Heide eventually filed a lawsuit because the first result for a Google search on her name brought up anonymous comments on AutoAdmit that accused her of carrying an STD and sleeping her way to the top of her class. The Communications Decency Act was supposed to prevent this kind of thing, but an injunction prevented it from ever being enforced and eventually the Supreme Court killed it. Should the law be changed?" The article links to a proposal from last summer in the New Jersey legislature that would institute a DMCA-like takedown regime for allegedly defamatory content posted on a Web site, and would allow aggrieved parties to demand the identity of anonymous posters without a subpoena. No indication of how that proposal fared. Also linked is a recent North Carolina proposal that would criminalize the act of defaming someone using an electronic medium. This proposal shields Web sites from liability and explicitly does not apply to anonymous speech.
I didn't realise Heide Iravani might have had an STD until she fought so hard to stop people talking about it.
Considering something like 70% of people carry HPV the odds are in your favour that you're telling the truth whenever you say someone has an STD.
Really?
Direct insult:
You: "You have AIDS, and are sleeping your way to the top."
Me: "Oh... k... then."
Life-altering damage: 0
Indirect insult:
You: "[my name] has AIDS and is sleeping his/her way to the top."
Potential employer 1: "We'll call you when we know."
Potential employer 2: "We can't risk hiring you. Of course, if you sue, we'll say you didn't have the skills we need."
Life-altering damage: no possibility of a decent career, may as well commit suicide.
Yeah, pretty much this exactly.
Done properly (use TOR, pick "targets" entirely at random, MASSIVE number of "targets" (probably at minimum 10k or so) and make it pretty much impossible to track a real person to blame) and you could get this to be a large enough noise source that corporations couldn't rely on internet searches for employee information any more.
Hmmm... Might want to modify that random - make sure about 25-50% of mid and upper level executives of all companies in the fortune 1k are included.
Who wants to get the /b/tards started on this?
And opinion should be neither. ( which is where this is headed ultimately, to restrict you from expressing your opinion, unless its an 'approved' opinion )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In the real world, if I were to post anonymously that Zero_DGZ is a pedophile who visits Thailand to frequent child brothels, there are other anonymous idiots who would read this and post it as news. Once a few hundred people posted this juicy bit of information, people would cease to note it was anonymous and think "Google says lots of people think that...", and before long you would get a visit from the FBI.
It may be that anonymous statements of opinion, as in "I think ZeroDgZ is sociopathic", should be protected, but statements presented as facts that are actually lies should not. Using anonymity to protect against suit for libel should also not be protected (it is illegal in many countries as regards print media at least).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"then a person would have to be an idiot to ascribe any weight to them"..judging by the economic news over the past two years, you just described about 95% of business executives, including the people who hire and fire people. In fact the terms idiots and morons doesn't even come close, we really don't have any good description with a single noun to describe the sheer arrogance, incompetence and believing in the economic tooth fairy that has gone on now with these business "elite" folks.
And this therefore makes it a serious problem, one of many right now because of those people.
The economy is tanking hard, and for the most part, the same megagreedidiots who caused all the mess are *still in charge* making decision after decision. And the bigger the idiot, the more they are getting bailed out by putting the tax payers in debt for the next 50 years (some big number).
Yes I have been a victim of this. Some moron who shares my name is a moderately infamous white supremacist.
Needless to say he has a prominent wikipedia and google presence.
I have actually lost business due to this, as someone looked him up, thought it was about me, and wrote smearing emails about me to my client. I cleared it up with the client but the FUD damaged the relationship and no further business ensued. And who knows, maybe it has cost me job interviews as well.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There is this concept called considering the source.
Yes there is. Until the world at large does it, however, its not going to help.
If the poster is anonymous and makes claims without backing them up, then a person would have to be an idiot to ascribe any weight to them.
So everyone on the planet (except you and me of course) are idiots. That's not going to help much though, since all the idiots around us make tons of decisions that directly affect us.
Case closed.
Not until we get rid of the idiots. I wouldn't hold my breath.
In my opinion, there is only one way to do this properly in the US. We hold a Constitutional Convention, and we reevaluate the first amendment in a modern context.
Any attempt to do this legislatively should be jealously struck down by the Supreme Court.
Oh, and Rush Limbaugh just launched his political action committee. He's going to try to bring down President Obama. So consider carefully whether you want the "protections" this law affords.
Honestly, I think we need to limit the speech rights of legal entities, to level the playing field with the humble individual. We need to state that a conglomerate of any kind, be it a union or a corporation, does not have the same rights as an individual, in order to strengthen individual rights.
The problem here is not free speech. It is that individual rights have been diluted by poor choices, and "common sense" has been diluted by collective organizations that have more rights than a person because they have more money. We need to reevaluate those choices, and stop looking at this as a zero sum game.
--
Toro
How can you have a "class" of capitalists when everyone is able to own property ?
It's possible if only members of the upper class have a reasonable chance of bootstrapping themselves into owning enough property to get anything done.
Well that's not the case now. Technology is cheap. Computers, tools, machines (lathes, mills, even CNC machines), power are all accessible by pretty much anyone who wants them. Knowing a number of people (including myself) who own their means of production, some even without borrowing, I can tell you that it is quite attainable.
The problem is that people have been conditioned to subservience and dependence in school. The "chains" of modern western "slavery" are quite fragile, so long as you can overcome the social conditioning. Exchanging subservience to a corporation for subservience to the state is not a solution.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
You stop being a pansy and forget about it; even a half-brained idiot can see that internet forums are generally less reliable sources of information than the babbling lunatic homeless guy on the street corner. If your employer believes that nonsense, then you probably don't want to work there because the company is going down in flames.
Use them for anything interesting and get sued. Patents to cross-license with the upper class members that hold broad patents in your field are not cheap. Or am I missing something fundamental?
Yes, the fact that there is a heap of stuff invented more than 20 years ago that is still profitable to produce, ie: products that have no patents. Not everything is IT, not everything is changing at lightning speed.
As one example, I'm in the process of starting a side business. It doesn't have to support my family, but it could potentially do that down the track. Certainly it can provide a buffer for me that can give me that much more ability to walk away from a deal offered by a corporation. It's furniture timber. I have both timber supply and sales organised. Total outlay will be under $10,000, much less to get started (I already have some of the equipment I need anyway). I'm doing it in my backyard, all my equipment works off site or is electric and wont disturb the neighbors. I anticipate that I can make $1000+ per month doing this without too much trouble. Not too bad for part time. A pretty good back-up that can be expanded in six weeks to quadruple capacity if necessary. Without the availability of cheap technology it would be very difficult. The reality is that productive capacity that used to require substantial investment is now within reach of everyone. Economies of scale favor the large producer, the cost of distribution favors the small local producer. I can move my product in a trailer behind a car! Try that Ikea! I also have no lease to pay, no wages, no shareholders. My product is environmentally friendly (all my timber is recovered from felled trees that would otherwise be in landfill) and my waste product can be sold/used as fuel.
As a bonus, I can teach my kids a bunch of interesting stuff and involve them with my work. All made possible by capitalism. If you're creating technology you may run up against patents, but not by using it.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
The problem with laissez-faire capitalism is that it stops being laissez-faire after a while. The Holy Free Market will eventually evolve to the system you have now, where large corporations buy up smaller ones for the sake of efficiency (or the threat of a smaller, more nimble company taking away from their bottom line) so consumers have less choice (where free market proponents usually say that the free market means more choice). Then they start buying up laws, I mean making huge contributions to both parties. Now we have government involved after all.
My point: a true laissez-faire capitalist society needs government involvement to keep it laissez-faire.
My conclusion: your laissez-faire society just imploded in a puff of logic.
That sounds like an argument that everything should be criminalized, and nothing should be a civil matter. *shudder*