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Comment by cf | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the hand wringing. If you have an image sharing service you will have to contend with child pornography. If you have any content sharing service you have to deal with copyright infringement. You need a lawyer to create a company. If you do open source you will often put a license file in your github repo.

Tech has already and will continue to interact with laws/lawyers. At some point open source libraries will appear to streamline compliance. For now it sucks but ya gotta muddle through or call it a day.

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In the first two cases, we generally don't. Or didn't, until recently. DMCA is very push-oriented: You get a takedown notice specifying certain URLs, you take down that content. Compliance solved!

GDPR requires restructuring of applications to keep data on a temporary basis with the consent of the users, to remove data after the fact, to selectively restore, and to allow users access to their own data. These are proactive steps required, and while applications written in the next six months will be built with those requirements in mind, it's still a fairly large burden for business-as-usual applications.

Totally, but there are unlikely to be many ways to structure the law to give users consent over their data and not burden business as usual. Even responding to DMCA requests is burdensome. You can automate it like Google has tried but it fails sometimes and has become a major technical and personell challenge.

I don't want to trivialize compliance. Even ostensibly simple requirements are never quite that, and every second spent on them is time not spent on your product.

> GDPR requires restructuring of applications to keep data on a temporary basis with the consent of the users

The GDPR requires mostly that you document what data is stored and how, and that you have a legitimate reason for doing it this way. Consent is not necessarily required.

> to selectively restore, and to allow users access to their own data.

So, you get a takedown/access notice, and then you take down/show that data. Compliance solved.

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