So someone posted a real photo of 'Eric driving drunk' to the web. Eric did not approve of that in any way and wants it gone. The someone could not care less. What is the solution in your model?
That's the nature of the internet. The great equalizer
The problem is the content showing up when searching for someone's name, not that there is an article on a website somewhere.
I guarantee Yandex and Baidu will not respect western delusions of security through obscurity.
This has nothing to do with security through obscurity, it has to do with rights of human beings. Anyway Google doesn't either, hence the article.
so let's say Eric was out drunk with his friends and they walked in a sex shop and picked up some dildos because hah hah this shit is funny we are so drunk and then Eric took some silly photos cuddling the dildo or mimicking putting it in his ass and someone posted it to the internet and now eric would like it gone.
Now Eric's pictures on the internet are actually sort of funny so they have gotten some exposure, and so Eric finds he can't keep his job at the local macho place of employment - I don't know why, maybe he's not good at talking shit to anyone who talks shit to him so everybody picks on him about his stupid funny photos.
So he gets fired or quits because can't handle the harassment, and is sick of going out and hearing hey it's dildo guy. So he moves away. Nobody in his new town know's he's dildo guy, but then he goes out one night with this girl, and somebody exclaims omg it's that dildo guy, hey look at this everybody I got me some google skills, I saw this hilarious picture one time.
Now on the one hand Eric has given the world a lot of (unpaid) entertainment as dildo guy, but on the other hand when he commits suicide because he is emotionally unconstituted to go through life being called out every now and then as dildo guy then he makes people feel bad. So in order to allow Eric to make his stupid drunk dildo hugging photo and not ruin the rest of his life for something embarrassing but totally legal let's just give him the right to remove the stuff from google. That way, when he moves from his old town where there are lots of people remembering the whole dildo picture situation, in his new town people didn't know him when it was fresh and his stupidity is somehow 'forgotten' thus preserving the ability that people have had throughout history of moving from one area because their reputation at that area had become to problematic to continue. Google makes sure the reputation follows.
Removing it at the source removes it from google.
It's like saying the problem isn't that there is a negative story about you in The New York Times from 2007, the problem is that ISPs allow their customers to read that story in The New York Times. Obviously the "problem" is the story -- which you may have no legitimate right to prevent people from reading -- and if you have a legitimate complaint (i.e. libel) then you should have to take it up with The New York Times and not Comcast or Google.
The reason people want to go to Google instead is that they know Google doesn't have a strong enough incentive to stand up for the victim of the censorship. If you go to the source they may refuse to take it down and force you to adjudicate the matter in court where they can argue their side in front of a judge. If you go to Google, economically they have to take it down because nobody is paying them to hire lawyers to spend the hours it takes to make accurate legal determinations and they would go out of business taking on that role without compensation for seven billion people.
All of the "right to be forgotten" arguments seem to devolve to "people shouldn't be able to know any data points that would negatively effect my social standings".Isn't that a point in the other direction? The existence of convincing fakes will teach people not to believe everything they see on the internet.
If that someone shared it on their own website, hosted out-of-country, on their own hardware... well, I can't do anything about that but i also wouldn't care. It's clearly non-authoritative and won't get SEO traction by itself.
Does Europe not have the concept of a court-appointed lawyer?
> RTBF makes it possible for ordinary citizens who can't afford fancy lawyers to fight big corporations to seek redress.
No it makes it possible for criminals to hide their criminality. To be very blunt, if I were an employer, I don't want to hire a murderer. I don't care if he/she was convicted and served their time. Once you have committed murder, I will not hire you. I will not deal with you in any way. Hiding/obfuscating true information from me is wrong. Criminality is public record. It should be easily accessible.
RTBF does not protect murderers, this is a fundamental lack of knowledge of the law and its clearly marked boundaries.
Not sure you understand how court-appointed attorneys work. First off, you can't use one to sue someone else since you can only get a court-appointed attorney when you're being charged in a criminal suit.
Second, court-appointed attorneys suck. They are underpaid, overworked, and unable to properly do their jobs as is.
Requiring legal action would indeed create a scenario where only the rich bring such cases to trial.
I'm uneasy about some RTBF cases, but where you have a person making prolific publications across a variety of legal jurisdictions and ignoring the legal rulings (which happens in cases of stalking and harrassment, for example) it's impossible for the victim (and they do suffer real harm) to get justice other than asking search engines to de-index the attack pages.
Our legal system tends to attack actual bad actors, not convenient targets. Unless the Internet is involved. The way RTBF and DMCA work, search engines bear 100% of the cost, and people don't ever go after the actual bad actors.
By the way, in the US, if Tabloid X publishes Eric's photo, that's 100% legal thanks to the First Amendment, as long as the photographer agrees. Eric has no part. Attacking search engines on behalf of Eric, in the US, not so cool. Europe doesn't have free speech, so, no problem.
RBTF, maybe, but how is the DMCA this way? Certainly not the takedown notice/counternotice provision, which doesn't create new liability, only a special shield from any pre-existing liability.
The problem is that the shield has value to the search engine in excess of the cost to the search engine (but not the cost to the censorship victim) of removing the information. It reduces their risk, even when the risk is low because they would be likely to win, and removes the cost of having to litigate the issue even if they do win, so the search engine takes the deal and then executes ~all the notices even when they're bogus.
Which is a direct cost to the censorship victim compared to handling it the way Section 230 does it, and an indirect cost to the search engine because it has them paying to process the removal of legitimate information and reduces the value of their service to customers -- just not enough of an indirect cost to give them the incentive to refuse, because the brunt of the cost is on the third party being censored.
The search engine could ignore all takedowns and be in exactly the same situation as it would be without the DMCA; the safe harbor provision isn't a mandate on them, it is a benefit to them. They deal with takedowns because the cost of doing so is less than the cost of copyright liability they would have without the DMCA, which means the DMCA is saving them money, not imposing a cost.
And if you've never gotten a DMCA takedown from Perfect 10, you probably don't understand the true terror of the DMCA process.
You're treating the safe harbor and notice and takedown as indivisible when they obviously aren't. Conditioning the safe harbor on notice and takedown is a huge cost compared to the alternative used in CDA 230.
They obviously are both part of the DMCA, so you can't say that the DMCA imposes costs based on the notice and takedown condition for the safe harbor, because ignoring that condition leaves the host in the same position they would be in without the DMCA.
You can say that the notice and takedown requirement reduces the cost savings of the safe harbor compared to the hypothetical policy of an unconditional safe harbor, or one with alternative sets of conditions, but that's a very different claim than the DMCA imposing costs.
The safe harbor and the anti-circumvention rules are both part of the DMCA too, but it's silly to argue that the anti-circumvention rules don't impose net costs because if you average them together with the safe harbor it comes out somewhere near neutral. They don't cease to be divisible just because they were enacted at the same time. Otherwise you could justify anything by just finding something which is as good as the target thing is bad and lumping them together on the same side of the scale.
No-where[1] has the US's extremist version of freedom of speech. Europe has a different form of free speech, and in this example Eric's right to be forgotton probably doesn't trump Someone's right to publish true information.
I guess there'd be some judicial attempt to balance these two rights: Does Eric pose a continuing risk to the public from drunk driving? Is Eric a public figure who's claimed to never have driven drunk? Was this a one off event that happened many years ago, never repeated? This would be something courts are able to decide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...
BTW, search engines don't "publish" information in the US sense of the word. The way Russia forces Yandex to self-censor is that Yandex is liable for everything they show to users. That's 'publishing' in the US sense. Newspapers have publishers, and the publisher is the person you sue if you think the newspaper has libeled you.
Meanwhile, Europe (mostly) doesn't consider RTBF to be censorship because it only involves censoring search engines and not newspapers. Except that people are filing RTBF against newspaper site search, too.
Europe definitely has free speech (all the countries I know of anyway, Europe has a lot of different countries). There is just a different definition of what exactly is free speech and what is something else (some racist things are not considered free speech).
And sure, I'm sure you'd call what you have free speech. But that's not the way the US defines it.
Nope it's not, it's an EU law and EU !== Europe. Europe has 51 countries while the EU only has 28. Just like Mexico is not in the US, a ton of European countries are not in the EU.
Just because hate speech isn't protected doesn't mean we don't have free speech.