Serious threat to the web in Italy
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
Why don't they convict the ISPs, Internet Cafe's or the Computer Manufacturers?
They have the same responsibility as Google has on this issue.
TVs should, at this point, have significant technology to figure out that someone is getting beat up on the display and stop the user from viewing it.
No, they don't. Google owned and operated the site that hosted the video; they have the full responsibility for insuring that they abide by Italian law. Guilty as charged.
Sure, I would like to have material like that magically disappear too, along with the kind of people who would do such a thing. But if we move the level of discourse into the real world rather than la-la land, we have to accept that we can neither use magic, nor vet every piece of content prior to publishing it.
You are free to post obnoxious shit on the internet without it being vetted first, just like you are free to say obnoxious shit without permission from anyone. The consequences come afterwards — and the fault is yours, not the providers of the medium you chose as the vessel for your content.
Freedom of speech ain't pretty. But the alternative is much much worse. This is the only way it can be done.
And in the case of free speech, this would mean Italy is doing the equivalent of trying to jail air for not maintaining privacy. Or, perhaps more accurately, they're jailing one who makes air (God and/or plants, take your pick) for not making air shut certain people up before they say something wrong.
It makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Even if there isn't freedom of speech in a location, you don't put the papermakers in jail because someone wrote something mean on it.
It was originally meant to protect providers of online bulletin boards, as this was some time before the Web 2.0 kind of user information sharing exploded.
But the cause of Freedom is not best served by holding up "freedom to laugh at retards" as a fundamental right.
Let's not forget that Google is perfectly technologically capable of filtering its content - and we know that because it does it in China.
In any LLC or publicly held company this is simply not true, legally.
And, then, sue the god, for his/her creations did the crime.. And, if the god can't be sued, well, sue the Pope.
Side note: The blog doesn't mention, but why did the Italians pick these 4 people. What is there connection, if any, to this whole episode?
Unfortunately here in italy the vast majority of people don't know english so they can't even be informed of what's happening outside the country.
My usage of "Italians" was just a common English shortening of "Italian authorities" to "Italians" based on the context.
By "Italians" I did not mean Italian people, but just the Italian authorities, that too specifically the ones involved in this case.
Why is this? Is it by design so that I am always culpable and can thus be controlled/negotiated with?
Or is it just stupidity/contradictory laws, etc.
I'm not referring to a 70s-style revolution with public executions of the ruling class etc., but I'm predicting some radical changes in the democratic/political system. Transparency, accountability, fewer and simpler laws and significantly smaller government.
Every week it seems I hear of impossible to enforce laws trying to regulate behavior or thought. (just today, trying to make open source using countries suspect, everyone is probably a federal criminal, etc) Trying to fight technology with regulation (drm, dmca, etc). I hear misleading announcements every morning on my commute saying the police have the right to search me without cause. (They can't unless you agree, yet.)
In the past 10 years things like this seem to be escalating and technology seems to have sped it up. Loosely and with a grain of salt; Content filtering and monitoring lead to tor, unjust laws lead to the EFF and ACLU, censorship of news lead to wikileaks, etc.
People will eventually get radicalized, wont they?
Honestly I probably don't know my history very well, maybe this is just SOP for humanity, a constant back and forth.
Just do us a favor, if something does start happening and you do opt out, don't make it harder on the rest of us. ;-)
Young people get radicalized. Then they get married, have kids, get a career, get debts, etc. Radicalness over. People eventually sell-out, cop-out, or join up. They rarely stay radicalized.
That is SOP for humanity at least last 80 years or so that I know about.
If you want to argue historical examples, both the french revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe followed this pattern.
Makes a lot of sense to me, personally. Though I'll grant that won't happen, it's an ideal to shoot for, instead of endlessly patching problems with laws that noone can possibly comprehend the ramifications of due to the system's complexity.
Start with the politicians, the government and then the laws.
Last I checked, Italy was a democracy.
Spend the next 20-30 years of your life trying to change the way institutions do things and going up against people who want to keep the status quo because it keeps them in power.
Or
Spend a few months preparing to move to another country that matches your values.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Oh well... time to go back to reality ;)
Also, as much as we hate to admit it because it makes us feel insignificant, "if everyone does it" is not a very good way to make decisions. Unless you have a lot of influence over many, many other people, nobody else is going to do it just because you did it.
I guarantee you it isn't easy. It's still better than the alternative though.
I'm not grandstanding here, Greek law is also flawed, as is US law (e.g. DMCA). It just never ceases to amaze me in how many ways national laws are out of sync with the Web.
Perhaps it's a good thing in the long term though. By these blatantly idiotic conclusions, it is plain for everyone to see that something in the reasoning process is broken.
I have a 3 hour lecture on DVD from a powerful Chinese CCP member/academic talking mostly about globalization, I should really digitize it and post the highlights sometime. If anyone wants to see this lecture, email me.
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The only country where a conviction like this would have been meaningful is in the USA, because Google is from the USA and in some important ways the USA owns the internet. Even if the conviction of the Google executives was upheld at the EU level, it wouldn't do much more than cause Google to open up divestment discussions with Europe, similar to their ongoing discussions with China. Europe is not stupid enough to kick Google out, though China (and by China I mean the rulers of the CCP, not the people of China) probably is that stupid and evil.
By the way, though the Italian court system is clearly very flawed, I do give them credit for being able to hold executives accountable for crimes committed by the corporation.
Anyways, AFAIK (and it's not much) Berlusconi right now controls/owns a good majority of media companies. Also there are a fair numbers of scandals involving him which aren't reported by the media outlets he owns. Now if Italy is anything like my native Romania, lately the Internet is becoming both a tool and a media for the political life. And we all know the Internet is harder to control, so efforts by the government in this direction could be expected.
I also think Google is not a chance target. A conviction, even a weak one like this, sends a very strong message to the _local_ companies. If Google couldn't win, who can? And I think the Italian language sites were the target from the beginning. If the conviction stands (and maybe even if it doesn't), this will still have a terrible chilling effect on the news sites there. Now they know that no matter how big or insignificant they are, their owners or operators can find themselves in jail at a prosecutor's whim. Because ways of breaking such laws are not hard to find.
* Nearly as much cultural variety. I spent last weekend in Meran, which 100 years ago was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and is still mostly German speaking, with traditional Tirolean architecture. It's pretty much night-and-day with, say, Sicily, or the almost Greek looking bits of Puglia.
* A truly staggering amount of art and architecture that goes back 3000+ years, from Greek ruins in Sicily to, of course, the Romans, through the middle ages, and so on and so forth. This is really "fractal": you can see Rome and Venice and whatnot, but also see pretty interesting things in the smallest of regional towns.
* A generally pleasant climate.
* Good food. Really good.
* Beautiful girls:-)
Just off the top of my head.
is that last part a typo? or is my ignorance of legalese showing?
edit: ah, so apparently they were given a suspended sentence, but absolved of the defamation part.
0 guilty of 'criminal defamation'
Two separate charges.
Edit: found in the neighbor thread. "The three received a suspended six-month sentence for the conviction on violating the youth's privacy."
Don't be dense, Google. What they're telling you is that the right people need to be paid-off or you're going to have more and more problems like this.
By such criteria the fraction of, say, the top 1,000 most popular web sites that could legally operate in Italy currently without being vulnerable to a legal problem of that sort is probably fairly small.
Looking at Alexa's top sites I see the following sites within just the top 40 that can't operate in Italy without risk of a prosecution of this sort: facebook, youtube, wikipedia, blogger, twitter, myspace, wordpress, amazon, ebay, linkedin, livejasmin, rapidshare, flickr, craigslist (most of the remaining sites are search engines).
Also, this is certainly bad for david drummond. Having a conviction like this as a lawyer surely must hurt your standing with the bar association in CA.
I highly doubt the bar association in CA would not be able to make up their mind for themselves and see a politically motivated judgement when they see one.
Just as I don't think they have official offices in each US state they don't need to have offices in each EU state.
They are just looking for trouble given the peculiarities of each state which includes law and tax system but also gray stuff like corruption, political pressure, etc.
By what mechanism?
http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/Imagine-There...
Not that I agree with the verdict, but yeah, two months is excessive.
What more can you reasonably expect them to do?
There has been an increasing trend in law to rely on blanket "safe harbour" conditions when it comes to on-line activities. Those conditions act as a get out of jail free card for big organisations, and I'm not sure that is healthy. If you set up a service that can host content provided by others, and that service is successful in large part because it enables people to break some law (copyright, privacy, whatever), why should you get a free pass? What you are doing is not then the same as a post office or phone provider, because you are directly profiting and your business model is based in part on illegal activities.
An extension of this idea is that several powerful corporations, Google among them, have been pushing back the boundaries of the law concerning privacy, personal data protection, intellectual property rights, defamation and so on, as hard as they can. I am quite sure that that is not a healthy trend. Services like Google Groups and Google News are based on leeching the work of others. Google Maps and Google Street View have serious privacy concerns, to the extent that both have been partially blocked in several nations either by law or just by large numbers of people turning out to physically block the camera car from entering their village. Google Video/YouTube established themselves based substantially on blatant copyright infringement. And then you get things like the Buzz fiasco a few days ago.
All of this is done from behind a virtual shield where it is almost impossible for anyone who is damaged by such actions to contact Google about it short of filing a court action. The latter is prohibitively expensive in some jurisdictions, notably including the US, in cases where the damage is not a substantial direct financial cost that a court can award back, which basically means the little guy can't stand up to the mighty corporation even in cases where the corporation's behaviour is clearly unethical and/or illegal.
While I would certainly prefer to have robust laws implemented to protect personal privacy and the like, and to see Google forced to comply with those like anyone else, until that happens I half-welcome just about any non-violent effort to check the Powers That Be and make them reconsider whether some of the things they are trying to achieve are a step too far. Legal shenanigans are a game Google likes, and turnabout is fair play.
Safe harbor rules are what makes the internet of today work.
Today, content isn't just generated from large, powerful, corporations... it's generated from us. For example, Hacker News is protected from any liability this comment might have due to safe harbor rules. It's the reason YouTube can exist. It's the reason why blogging services can exist. It's the reason Twitter can exist (you can still argue whether or not it should though... ). The point of safe harbor is to assign the liability for the content to the creator, not the service that publishes it. The company that serves the content is only liable after they've been notified. This is critical for today's internet.
Any company that allows users to post content (messages, comments, videos, anything) must have safe harbor protections to operate. If they didn't, then they would be responsible for any liability for everything, so they'd have to moderate every single comment, every single video, etc... Basically, this would shut down the user-supplied content that rules the modern internet. What we'd be left with is a computerized version of the one-way communications of old-media.
That would be a bad thing.
Also, you're unnecessarily extending safe harbor protections to where they don't exist. For example, Google Maps and privacy. This is Google's content. They created it. They published it. And they are absolutely responsible for making sure that they are compliant with any privacy regulations. This doesn't fall under safe harbor at all.
Sure companies make mistakes with privacy, your example of Google Buzz is a good one. However, don't confuse these issues with safe harbor. In this specific case in Italy, it is safe harbor that is under attack. And that's a bad thing for Italy.
About aggregation sites like Hacker News, you do have a strong point, though.
[1] I mean as easy as Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Twitter… Any harder and it won't work.
I agree... :) it would be nice for all of us to be able to "publish" ourselves... but for the most part, even if we did have better low-power home servers and enough bandwidth to serve the content, most people won't be able / willing to set it up. So, I think in general, the mass-public will be stuck with the Bloggers and YouTubes of the world.
When you buy hosting online, you buy more than space on a hard disk.
I don't think most people really need high availability, so UPS and redundant connections sound like overkill. For fail-safe hardware, we just need something "unplug proof". A Beagle Board (with a few GB of Flash and a small battery) is more than enough.
I am aware that such a solution will be a little less convenient than storing everything "in the cloud", no matter how easy it can be. But the cloud has its downsides as well: you hardly have any privacy in the cloud, and they can shut everyone down, for any reason.
As for the difficulty of running things without safe harbour provisions, people are quick to assume that there are no or only limited alternatives, and that without the current scheme we would somehow "kill the Internet", but I challenge that assumption, based on the argument that follows.
Firstly, if there's one thing the Internet has managed to do successfully for a long time, it is evolving creative solutions to large scale problems. The Web started as a small network of pages, with only a few carefully chosen links between them. Then we evolved web rings to help people find related content. After that, ever-improving search engines became the dominant way to find material. Today we have link aggregators, status updates/tweets, etc. There is no reason to believe that removing one form of expression would make things worse; on the contrary, if history is anything to go by, it might well catalyse the development of a better replacement.
On which note, I think we are going to move towards "Web 3.0" where user-generated content is balanced with editorial control by real people anyway. Web 2.0 was an interesting experiment, but the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible, the volume of information is overwhelming, and the simple, user-supported voting systems of today are widely abused and not really up to the job. Even the poster child, Wikipedia, now has policies that prevent open contributions to certain articles, internal politics among the volunteer editors about what should be allowed, etc. I think the kind of purely automated content hosting sites with unlimited user generated content are already dead, they just don't know it yet.
Next is a key point that I imagine some here may disagree with: I have never believed in absolute freedom of speech (of the kind where you can say whatever you like with no responsibility for any consequences). Words are very powerful things, and in the Internet era that power is magnified many times over. I believe that people should be held responsible for something they say that is unreasonably damaging to others, whether it be betraying a confidence, starting a malicious rumour, giving misleading "expert" advice in a field such as health or finance... This is just common decency and courtesy, and indeed almost nowhere has really had freedom of speech in law for many years, because of issues like defamation, national security, court-ordered anonymity for victims of certain crimes, etc.
These things have been part of the law in many jurisdictions since long before the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet, there is no such thing as an off-hand comment quickly forgotten. Society needs to adapt to this new reality, appreciating the benefits of giving everyone the power to speak to millions of others, but imposing suitably harsh penalties for those who use that power irresponsibly.
I just don't see how that is compatible with broad measures like absolute freedom of speech or complete safe harbour rules for those republishing material to potentially huge numbers of people. Those are merely convenient blanket laws designed for ease of implementation, not because they reflect the ethical thing to do.
So I'm not convinced that a law that imposed responsibility and as a side-effect made it difficult to run unlimited user-generated content sites would cause the loss of something truly valuable. If you want to write a dozen spam comments on a blog about how hot Hayden looked on Heroes last night, you are welcome to do it on your own personal web site, where your deeply-considered and original thoughts will no doubt receive the attention they deserve. And if you say something unfair in your next blog post that destroys someone's career, you can look forward to a personal letter telling you when to turn up in court and defend that action or be held accountable.
Meanwhile, I don't see the kinds of rules I'm talking about halting the development of the Web, because I think we're going to move toward more editorial control on the big, popular sites for other reasons anyway. And even if you do believe in absolute freedom of speech, you can still publish what you want on your personal web site, you would just have to take personal responsibility for it accordingly instead of hiding semi-anonymously behind some giant organisation who will republish your material but shield you from being identified and thus held responsible for the consequences. I, for one, don't have a problem with that.
This fact is indifferent to whether you use web-rings, NNTP, your own "personal website," or YouTube to post content.
How about your local web hosting company, which " stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others" ?
How about your ISP, running a caching proxy such as Squid which " stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others"?
There are a lot of independent entities out there storing, publishing, and forwarding your content. Most make fractions of a cent on each "piece of data" - photo, video, blog, whatever that flows through their system. They cannot commercially afford to screen it all, or even sample it.
Can you read every single article on the new page of Hacker news? 24/7? How about on Digg?
Why do you expect someone else to?
I'm not saying there should be no provisions in law to support the effective running of the Internet. I've never said that. I'm just saying that companies who want to establish a certain business model on the Internet shouldn't get a free pass just because it is difficult to run a business with that model while still complying with the same laws as everyone else. If that means some companies cannot continue, so be it: as I said before, I don't think anything of significant value will ultimately be lost, and I would rather that than effectively legislate certain businesses above the law just because they can't work out how to do things legally otherwise.
Your final comments are a straw man. Hacker News and Digg aren't republishing those articles, they're just linking to other sites that do.
Also, I am not certain this would be a good thing to always require content to have someone be accountable for it. If I want to express, say, a dissenting political opinion, I may want to be anonymous, and I may not want to pass the burden of accountability to someone else.
This is worth reflecting on it, however.
I am certainly not saying that no protected speech should exist. Indeed, I am all in favour of a law that protects certain classes of speech, with political views probably the most important class.
I just think that such laws should be crafted carefully, striking a balance between freedom of expression and protecting people from the harm when others abuse that freedom, and that once such laws have been made, they should apply on the Internet as much as anywhere else.
There are complications with jurisdiction in the on-line world, but there is no reason that most of the international community can't reach a consensus on these issues, just as they have on many others before.
I have always struggled with the idea of anonymity as a vehicle for free speech, for three reasons. Firstly, most people who think they are anonymous on-line really aren't, if someone tries hard enough to identify them, so it is often an illusion. Secondly, actively protecting anonymity automatically removes any responsibility from the speaker, whether or not what they are saying is within a protected area, creating a huge loophole in the laws. Finally, while anonymity may have a perceived value in protecting those opposing an undemocratic government, we don't have that situation anywhere in the west (to the point where political dissidents are routinely threatened or "disappeared"), and if we ever reach that point again, the correct response will be one of the three boxes after "soap".
Firstly, if you need Wikileaks in the first place, you have bigger problems.
Secondly, Wikileaks actively tries to place itself above the law. No-one should be above the law.
Thirdly, there is little that has been revealed via Wikileaks that could not have been revealed in the traditional way via a free press. Wikileaks may make things marginally easier, but if you're in the business of leaking private stuff only if it's easy, maybe you should reconsider your world view.
Finally, before anyone comes along and tells me how much good Wikileaks does, consider this: they also released the private membership list of an unpopular political party, causing very serious consequences for many members of that party. Whether or not you agree with their politics, that sort of action is way over the line. What about the anonymity of those party members?
If we carry out this reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, platforms like YouTube or Blogger won't last long. It would indeed end the web as we know it. It will not end free speech on the internet, though. Not by a long shot.
Free speech can be achieved through two means: the out of jail free card, or a way for people to publish themselves.
Self publication is possible: we just need personal web servers, symmetric bandwidth, and the promise that we won't sue any ISP for moving bits (we need that safe harbour). Of course, companies like Google or Facebook prefer the out of jail free card (for many reasons, they prefer your data to be on their servers rather than on your own). I think the people will rather take the self publication route, given the choice.
Oops! The search provider indexed it, and is serving it out to the world in the form of results. By duplicating your data without reading it, they're responsible. Jail for them.
Youtube and Blogger are a miniscule step beyond indexing. They're duplicating data you wrote on your computer, and serving it out to the world.
Content hosts cannot logically be responsible for user-submitted content. This leaves two outs: safe harbor, or only commercial content on the internet, so the buck can be passed (note that this is identical to a TOS). Remind me again where free speech fits in there?
edit: as I said in another comment: you don't put the papermakers in jail because someone wrote something mean on it.
A publishing platform can choose to be neutral (no power), or it can choose not to be. Of course safe harbour should apply to neutral media. For those that are not, however, I am not so sure. Almost, but not totally.
About the paper makers, you missed another point: anonymity. It should be very easy to reach the actual author of a paper, so this makes no sense to sue the paper maker. If the paper maker published all this stuff anonymously, and can't (or refuse to) disclose the author's name, however, that's a different story.
More-so than many other content-hosts, Google did act responsibly. If anything, Youtube is a medium just like the paper, but Youtube responds more rapidly and identifies criminals using the system uniquely, which is something paper cannot do.
Shall we eliminate all paper? It's easier to draw kiddie-porn on paper and post it up all over than it is to get away with it on Youtube.
Obviously, harboring criminals is different than helping an investigation to find the criminals. But without a takedown notice being ignored, there's no harboring, because there's no effective warrant. And without a legal takedown notice, there's no responsibility to remove anything, because to do otherwise would encourage people to restrict free speech just by complaining loudly.
Papermakers have the same measure of responsibility in this as Google. They can restrict selling paper to anyone until they see and approve the use of it, or stop selling altogether, or they can have a safe-harbor because they're merely creating a medium. If they sold paper to a book company that went on to write something which later got banned, they'd be in exactly the same position as Google, but nobody is saying we should all make paper ourselves, and affix our name and address to all the paper we make (running a server is easy to trace, telling who made paper isn't, so this is needed to level the playing field). And, as nobody can guarantee that that name and address are genuine on the paper, it cannot prevent anonymity, and loses significantly to a web host like Google who can point you to the source of everything they find.
Please, everyone, stop buying paper because people can abuse it. In fact, stop buying water because someone could use it to drown someone else, and the water company isn't doing anything to prevent this.
Why does no one bring up the fact that it's completely subjective? What one person finds offensive is completely different from another person. The internet will suddenly consist only of kittens and puppies in an effort by companies to avoid suits, and then someone will decide kittens and puppies are offensive too.
(I understand Italy isn't seeking specifically to ban things that are simply offensive, but that's the direction we'd go just seconds after letting a suit like this one go through)
That's an overly broad characterization. It has no impact on the vast majority of web users.