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European Court: Websites Are Responsible For Users' Comments
An anonymous reader writes: A new ruling from the European Court of Human Rights found it perfectly acceptable to hold websites responsible for comments left by users. Experts are worried the ruling will encourage websites to censor content posted by users out of concern that they're opening themselves up to legal liability. The judgment also seems to support the claim that "proactive monitoring" can be required of website owners. Peter Micek of digital rights group "Access" said, "This ruling is a serious blow to users' rights online. Dissenting voices will have fewer outlets in which to seek and impart opinions anonymously. Instead, users at risk will be dragged down by a precedent that will keep them from accessing the open ocean of ideas and information."
The Slashdot moderators don't censor; they rate things. I still see every single post. Zero posts are hidden. Which posts have you had outright deleted or modified against your wishes lately?
I read about this today, and what this Slashdot/Dice crap summary is claiming is absolute BULLSHIT.
The case in question is regarding defamatory comments posted to a site that the victim went to court over. The courts ordered that the content be taken down. The lazy assed website owners took SIX WEEKS to remove the content.
There is not ONE jurisdiction in the world where that would be considered acceptable.
Websites are NOT being held generically responsible for the content posted. In fact, the articles about this topic make it clear that the courts said only large commercial operators such as newspapers can be held responsible and fined for failing to take down content in a timely fashion when ordered to do so.
But hey, Dice just LOVES their clickbait lately, don't they?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
it's not illegal to say that homeopathy is bogus, English law might seek to punish such utterances but it does NOT outlaw saying it.
By the way, contrary to the example you gave, the practice of homeopathy in the UK is, in fact, illegal, in light of the fact that there is no evidence to claims of efficacy and the fact that the Advertising Standards Agency has pulled the industry on its claims of same and basically said that they're falsely advertising (tantamount to fraud). Ergo, it's not defamation to say that homeopathy is bogus since the official word is that it in fact is. http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I've never been stopped on motorways in the EU at 'check points' to present my identifying information like I have been in the US.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The right to anonymity is an essential part of freedom/free speech. Deciding whether to sign in or not should not have any bearing on the validity of any arguments espoused. Just because you feel safe enough to post comments under a username does not mean that everyone has that same luxury.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
The Guardian has been doing a lot of research on police killing people in the US compared to the rest of the world.
Here's a good summary article:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...
A few statistics from the article:
Fact: Police in the US have shot and killed more people – in every week this year – than are reportedly shot and killed by German police in an entire year.
Fact: Police in the US fatally shot more people in one month this year than police in Australia officially reported during a span of 19 years.
Fact: Police in Canada average 25 fatal shooting a year. In California, a state just 10% more populous than Canada, police in 2015 have fatally shot nearly three times as many people in just five months.
Fact: Police fired 17 bullets at Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was “armed” with a rock. That’s nearly three times what police in Finland are reported to have fired during all of 2013.
Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Nothing is "outright deleted with some regularity." The flag just puts the comment on a list that an editor looks over every day. We ban spammers who we find leaving links in comments, and occasionally mod down any egregious trolls that aren't already at -1. That's it. We've deleted comments in the past under legal threat but it's not our policy to do so normally. This comment showed up on the list but none of the editors are going to delete it. We think it's important to maintain a place where you can say whatever you want, even if that thing isn't popular or as in this case, correct.
"What kind of idiots actually write such things?"
In most of your particular extracts, it was mainly the administrators of the Marshall Plan, namely Americans and British politicians, and principally Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe MP (as he then was) taking inspiration from the work of John Peters Humphrey.
Codification was considered a good idea to avoid relitigation of common exceptions and strikings-of-balance, and to avoid imposing the need to reference foreign case law on the non-common-law countries that would agree to the document. Conflicts arose as well because some well-organized political party groupings (Christian Democrats in particular) threatened to slow ratification in a number of states simultaneously.
I think the vast majority of the people of Estonia would disagree with your assessment of the ECHR; it was a live issue in their accession referendum and is far better than the Soviet equivalent in every practical way.
Likewise, at the time it was written, Nazi laws were still on the books in the various sectors of Germany, and the legal system was a mess in all the different occupied sectors. Getting it working in *all* the sectors of occupied Germany (and Austria), including the Soviet sector was an explicit goal of the convention, and it actually succeeded in that respect for about a decade.
Finally, the document is a live one, and PACE proposes changes to clarify conflicts, to strengthen individual rights (that's the main theme) and subsidiarity, and so forth. PACE is made up of parliamentarians from each of the COE's member-states, meaning it's mostly EU parliamentarians, and since so few of their constituents engage with them on PACE, a letter written to one in an arbitrary EU member-state is likely to be looked at seriously. Maybe you could put your questions to one of them, or make some suggestions for improvement? "Just scrap it" is something they hear a lot more often from non-politicians than "fix it like this, and I'd be happier".