Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Court: Chinese Search Engine's Censorship Is 'Free Speech'
jfruh writes: "You will probably not be surprised to learn that Chinese search giant Baidu censors a wide range of content, particularly political material deemed to be pro-democracy — and does so for users everywhere, not just in China. A group of activists filed suit against Baidu in New York for violating free speech laws, but the judge in the case declared (PDF) that, as a private entity in the United States, Baidu has the right to provide whatever kind of search results it wants, even for political reasons."
Why? The constitution only regulates the US government. It doesn't regulate neither the Chinese government nor private entities inside or outside the US.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If one doesn't agree with the censorship Baido does one can simply _not_use_it_.
Because telling businesses what information they must provide to the public is the same as the old unconstitutional "fairness doctrine". Would you like to require that Rachel Maddow have Sean Hannity on her show every night to rebut her points? If a search engine is providing biased results, don't use it. Providing FALSE information could be a problem, as that would be libel.
I don't understand why I have to explain this on a forum that's populated by teens and adults. You can't use your rights to infringe on others' rights.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
" the right for people to be heard?"
Where does this right you mention come from? There's a right to free speech/expression, but where does the right to force another person or business to carry your speech come from? If I can force you to carry my speech, can I also force you to STFU?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Actually, as idiotic as it sounds, corporations are persons in the U.S. legal system. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
The US Constitution requlates state goverement since the passage of the 14th Amendment. A New York free speach law can not limit the speach of the owners and employees of Baidu. They are allowed to have bias.
I fail to see the relevance. No wait - I do. If they're enforcing free speech, that means they can't regulate what a person (or corporation) can say. Or selectively not say of their own volition. Does Freedom of Speech imply that we force people/corporations to say things that they choose not to? Regardless of their motivations? If I run a web-site and there's an article somewhere that says, "China censors nothing!", do I have to provide a link to it despite the fact that I personally think it's biased?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
... The judge was also reported to say "now that's decided I'm going to pick up a couple of strippers who will whip me while i wear their underwear"
Our knee-jerk reaction to this here in the U.S. is predictable: "Oh shit, there goes the 1st Amendment!".
Not so simple, though: Baidu is a private company here in the U.S., even if it's blindingly obvious it's 100% driven by the Chinese government/Chinese communist party (same thing, really) and as such they can provide whatever search results they want. Same would go for Google, or Yahoo, or Bing, or whoever -- the caveat being that if, say, Google decided to start censoring search results to the extent Baidu does, then Google would be finished as the de-facto search engine here in the U.S. However: Nobody is forcing you to use Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, or any other search engine here in the U.S. Even if you're a Chinese National living here in the U.S., unless the Chinese communist party has someone standing there with a gun to your head, you're free to NOT use Baidu, just like you're free to NOT use Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine, too. Don't bring me your "We don't REALLY have a choice" crap, either, because you do, even if you don't like the choices you have. Also, finally, someone else could always start up their own search-engine company if they think there's a niche to fill, and they could make a gigantic point of how they censor none of the results -- and they might even unseat everyone else in the process.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Freedom of speech doesn't mean I have to give you my microphone.
The whole point of freedom of speech is to allow people you disagree with to say (or write) what they want. If the westboro church can protest soldier funerals, this ruling should be a no brainer. The search engine is writing the search results in a biased way but the judge has ruled that is free speech. Fine with me... now back to searching on google.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Corporations are nothing more than a piece of paper, an act of incorporation, and should be treated as such.
Agreed on that point, but that leads me to the opposite conclusion. Individuals pursue values through institutions. It is the underlying right of the individual employees, workers, owners and executives that give the association of people that collectively we call a corporation the same rights as the individuals that are in association with one another. Call it whatever you want, a corporation or a knitting group, it is the rights of the individual to associate and retain their individual liberty both acting individually or in concert which is what must be respected by law.
It's really not that... a private company does not have obligation to provide a unfiltered/non-curated/fair search engine. It's like Fox News website - that's the "best information" for you, they think.
"Best" is subjective. The claim is mere puffery - any suit for false advertising would be quickly dismissed.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
corporations are groups of people working together for a common goal. Forming groups is a right under the 1st Amendment. or the right of the people peaceably to assemble The above right would be meaningless if the goverment could regulate the speach of groups. It is also impossible to regulate the speach of a group without regulating the speach of individuals. Corporations don't go to prison for violating censorship laws. The members of the group, employees, owners, and members go to jail. They are the ones who have their assets taken. Censorship of corporations is censorship of individuals.
As China is sovereign, they cannot be brought to bear in anyone's court.
If you seek to penalize companies or people that kowtow to same, that is the job of the president and Congress, not the courts, via diplomacy or military.
Our general policy for 50 years has been encouraging economic (and other) freedoms. Is it working? What are alternatives?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You are apparently not an American, as evidenced by your lack of understanding of our founding fathers and their writing of the constitution. Private individuals, or corporations, are not bound by the constitution, only the government is. If we were to bound private individuals it would run counter to everything they stood for. In other words, if you force private people/corporations to say what they dont wanna say then you dont have a democracy or a free people.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Corporations have grown to a size that the power and influence it has over the public is comparable to government, if not surpassing it.
No, you just don't know your history. Large corporations have long been able to compete with sovereign states in wielding economic, military, and political power. The American Revolution was rebellion against the East India Company nearly as much as it was against King George III.
The founding fathers were perfectly aware of the effects of megascale corporatism. Even the largest companies today have a fraction of the power the EIC did at it's peak. When Exxon starts deploying carrier battle groups around the world, then it will be comparable.
This ruling makes sense when you consider the alternative:
Government would have to police each search engine to make sure it was permitting full free speech.
Then, the potential for abuse is huge. Government could simply drop something -- like, say, far-right information -- off the list and allow it to be censored while claiming it was legally not censorship.
Government could also force search engines to incorporate other information that is favored by government, and penalize them if that information didn't make it high in the rankings.
We don't want government in the business of determining what "free speech" is in legal terms.
Futurist Traditionalism
You could, oh I dunno, not use this service.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You seem to be suffering from a common misconception. "Freedom of speech" does not mean I can go into any newsroom and demand that my thoughts and views be broadcast to all local viewers/readers. As a private entity, they have always had the freedom of speech to choose what message they send, and being able to force my way in would mean that my freedom of speech would be trampling over theirs. I'd hate to be in a world where people with a troll mentality could use their freedoms to render whole segments of society unusable.
This situation, while reprehensible to the vast majority of us, is functionally no different, and in no way suggests that corporate policy is above freedom. After all, at least in the US, users are free to use another service that does not send the message Baidu is sending, meaning that Baidu has no hold over them. In situations where there is a hold, such as an employee/employer relationship, there are additional laws and regulations protecting both sides, and we ever had some discussions over related topics a few days back after Mozilla appointed its new CEO who has some controversial private views.
What good is the first amendment if private entities providing essential information services to the public can effective bypass the right for people to be heard?
I fail to see the relevance. No wait - I do. If they're enforcing free speech, that means they can't regulate what a person (or corporation) can say. Or selectively not say of their own volition. Does Freedom of Speech imply that we force people/corporations to say things that they choose not to? Regardless of their motivations? If I run a web-site and there's an article somewhere that says, "China censors nothing!", do I have to provide a link to it despite the fact that I personally think it's biased?
I suspect that it depends on what your market share is, i.e. whether you are a "gatekeeper" or not. If you are just some two bit website that's one of a thousand others then the answer is that you can present whatever point of view you want and ignore others. If, however, you are Google, you handle 95% of all internet searches and you don't agree with, say the US Republican party's point of view so you start purging all links from your search results that represent a Republican point of view that you don't agree with then the game situations is a bit different and should be forced to be more neutral than you would like to be for the public good. I generally can't stand radical Republicans but I'll fight for their right to be heard, I don't have much use for communism either but I also think Commies have a right to be heard. This judge would seem to disagree with that which is IMHO quite amazing.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It can most certainly be applied to a business operating under the jurisdiction of the United States, the same way Google is expected to conform to the Chinese government's censorship requests to operate within their country. That's not American centrist thinking, that's just a logical way to assume businesses operate.
So, your solution to Baidu censoring searches to to censor MY access to Baidu?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Fine, let's look at your version of "freedom" where the Government now requires every website everywhere to continue to post forever every single word submitted to it. For example, Johnny Q. Racist posts some nonsense about $RACE being intellectually inferior to the NAACP web site forums? Too bad, NAACP; you've got to continue showing that because this fucking idiot says so in his completely incorrect interpretation of one of the most elegant laws ever passed by man.
Wouldn't being legally forced to keep that nonsense on the website infringe on the website owner's rights of free expression; specifically, the right for them to not express something?
Didn't think of that, did you? Pull your head out of your smug pompous ass. That's me freely expressing myself, and Slashdot, as a private entity, can feel free to eliminate it from their database without legal recourse. See what I did there?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The key word here is "government." Companies and individuals can restrict this right on their systems as they see fit. For example, spammers used to claim that they had a "right to be heard" which (in their opinion) meant that you had to allow any comment or e-mail get through. In their view, spam filters and the like infringed on their First Amendment rights. The big hole in their argument, though, was that it wasn't government that was blocking them, but companies and individuals. These entities have a right to block whatever they want.
I should note that when I say companies blocking items, I mean something along the lines of Slashdot taking posts down for spammy content, not Time Warner Cable blocking Netflix to promote their VOD services. The latter gets into a different territory than merely filtering out a type of speech.
Just because you have a right to free speech doesn't mean you have a right to be heard. To use a non-Internet-based analogy, you can stand on the street corner passing out flyers to promote your cause, but I'm under no obligation to take a flyer or to read it. If I take a flyer and throw it - unread - into a trash can right away, you would have no grounds to sue me for violating your Right To Free Speech.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The founding fathers of the United States of America were NOT supporters of Democracy as they knew from history and experience that Democracy leads to Oligarchy. Instead they founded a Republic!!!
Perhaps the first post with a long list of replies should learn about US founding history.
The right to force a business which has sole control (in China) of access to the world's news and uses that access to control the populations' perception? That right comes from our ass. Same as the rights to free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom not to be killed like a dog on the street if some business deems it necessary. There are no "rights" other than those we seize for ourselves, never have been. Rights are artificial and we buy them with intelligence, sweat, and blood.
We do not derive our rights from a "piece of paper", as Bush dismissively called it, but from our collective will. The constitution of the United States is not a holy book. It was a flawed piece of work, as its writers understood. That's why they crafted the 9th Amendment: rights enumerated in the document are not the static and only rights of man. Other rights exist, and they left that open for future generations to define.
The writers lived in houses without communications systems. They walked or rode horses. Corporations did not really exist. They did not envision a world in which mega-sized non-human non-governmental essentially lawless and untouchable and unfindable entities would seize control of the news outlets and "privately" censor the world.
NO. They would not approve of that and neither should anyone else. They'd kill to stop it.
A world of "private" businesses controlling our spaces, communications, food, water and employment is a feudal oligopoly. We did not build our country only to finally grant utter tyranny to rich Randian collectivists we can't even begin to overthrow because they don't physically exist. Hell, they have their own private police and armies to protect them from overthrow.
Take the right or live in hell. Your choice. Unless, of course, you're planning on cooperating with the new world order and being one of the bosses.
Something's been troubling me recently about the whole "corporations are people" thing. If corporations are people, what's to prevent corporations from running for public office? Suppose a corporation was founded in the US at least 35 years ago, could that corporation run for President? It's the logical (and frightening) conclusion to the "corporations are people" argument. How long until the companies stop merely buying candidates and instead BECOME the candidates?
You've fallen victim to propaganda.
There are many people who use the term "corporations are people" because it's absurd, the desire is to create a backlash against a strawman. Corporations are not "people". Corporations are "persons". There's an enormous difference.
I'll explain a few things.
The constitution references three types of being with rights.
Some of us belong to all three categories.
A person can be a living human being or a corporate person. Corporations are "persons" under the law, not people.
Only a human being can be a citizen. Corporations are not and can not be citizens.
The people are all of the citizens of the country, collectively and individually. This includes corporations, individual human beings as well as groups of corporations and human beings.
A requirement for for holding a constitutionally defined office is citizenship. One can not be a Senator, a Representative or the President unless one is a citizen. To be a citizen, one must be a human being.
Have you ever noticed that no one has ever sued the dog that bit him? If a car's brakes fail and you're struck, you don't sue the car. You sue the owner and/or the manufacturer. Same reason.
Corporate personhood isn't controversial or dangerous in any way. In fact, it's the very reason for incorporation. To "incorporate" is to "bring together into one (legal)body".
Non-persons can not be the object of legal proceedings. Non-persons can not own property. Non-persons do not have legal responsibilities.
What would the point of forming a corporation be if it weren't a separate being?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano