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Comment by tengbretson | Hacker News Reader

I don't hate the outcome, I just wish this was being done the "right way." The author and publisher should be held liable for the content and be made to pay for the damages they've caused. We have a court system for determining when someone is peddling lies and harming people. Is it too much to ask that we lean on our agreed upon institutions instead of making corporations elevate themselves to a less transparent, less democratic, worse version of our courts?

Is it too much to ask a company that provides a platform for commerce to just be a platform for commerce?

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>I don't hate the outcome, I just wish this was being done the "right way."

So your saying the right way is to force amazon to continue selling this book? That the sole remedy at Law is when people are injured then they can sue the author?

That’s not how products liability works. If I’m injured by a defective product, my legal remedy is against everyone in the stream of commerce...manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers, etc... they would all be jointly and severally liable for my damages, meaning I can collect 100% of my award for damages from any of the parties found liable.

Ideas aren't products. There's a difference between books and physical products that you ingest (such as arsenic or mentos). The GP's argument uses a false equivalency.

A book isn't just ideas though. If it's sold and presented by a retailer that you trust (Amazon), then those words carry a lot more weight for the readers than the ideas would on their own.

Bullshit. A book is just ideas that have been written down.

And the argument that buying it on Amazon gives it more credibility is so ridiculous that I actually laughed out loud.

> A book is just ideas that have been written down.

So are safety labels which attempt to minimize product liability.

So say I sell a chainsaw with safety labels that say to hold the chain and not the handle when starting the thing...could I be liable if someone is injured holding the chain? I mean the chainsaw was a perfectly safe product, as far as chainsaws go, it was only the following of my written down ideas that got someone injured.

I know exactly what you are saying and there is some case Law on point (a case involving a wild mushroom picking book and the plaintiff relying on the book and getting sick as a result). It’s one thing for the author to take that risk but it’s a whole other animal to force amazon to take that risk when they didn’t want to carry the book to begin with.

I'm not arguing that Amazon should be forced to sell these books. I'm arguing that the original argument above which used product liability for selling poisons to argue in favor of stopping the publication of books is inappropriate.

Products and ideas are two different things. Frankly, it's frightening that such a basic point has to be argued at all.

To the larger points about "censorship" being made here, for me it's not so much to do with the government banning books or corporations refusing to sell books. It's that there is so much fervor on so many fronts to prevent ideas from being presented at all. Bad ideas will ultimately be discarded if there is open and free discussion because they will be shown to be weak and wrong. Suppressing discussion is the tactic of those who are afraid their ideas won't win in a free marketplace.

> So your saying the right way is to force amazon to continue selling this book?

Possibly yes. When a publisher choses to sell through Amazon I assume that includes some form of legal agreement between the two parties. This idea that "They're a private company, they can do what they want" is wrong if they have some kind of agreement to sell the book.

The fact that we've been letting the tech giants get away with putting vague language into their terms of service and using that as a justification for arbitrarily enforcing or even changing the rules is bullshit. These catch-all provisions that let companies "do whatever they want" would never have stood up in court in the past. They are undermining our ability to conduct business and are being abused to stifle competition.

I’m no fan of big tech companies, but I am a fan of constitutional right for parties to contract.

There is no catch all Amazon can do whatever they want provision, but certainly the have the contractual right to stop carrying the book at anytime without notice. Just as if you are selling your book through traditional brick and mortar they could always stop selling/carrying your book (maybe there could be exceptions if they did it on the basis of discrimination against a protected class).

Trust me I wouldn’t even put amazon to allow others to sell a counterfeit of your book/product, which the law would provide a remedy for...but they have no contractual obligation to carry your book/product.

And how much time would that take? 1 day? 1 week? 1 year? 1 decade?

We are not robots, we don't have to strictly follow the "protocol" for every decision we need to make. We are humans and sometimes we need to use what we call the "common sense".

Of course that common sense is always subjected to the judgment of a person and that judgment can be biased towards something sometimes. But in this case the judgment is straightforward: there is no cure for autism. Period.

We can’t treat large corporations like government institutions, even if they have the power of them these days. IANAL, but if amazon doesn’t want to be held liable for the contents of these books in some inevitable tort case I think it’s entirely their judgement call to remove these books as a private entity. These writers aren’t a protected class.

It’s very difficult to sue someone in the US over the content of their book. Free speech was written into the constitution and then extended by the Supreme Court into a near absolute right unlike that in other western countries.

Giving medical advice, much like legal advice, opens you up to liability.

Not a lawyer. But as far as I know, only if you are providing medical services. I don't think a book would rise to that level. If it did, no professionals would ever write about medical issues for fear of being sued when their hypothesis don't work, or have side effects.

Now, if you were a health care provider and told your patients to read this book and do everything it tells you, you could probably sue the doctor. But not the author.

At an interpersonal level yes, but if you publish the same bad advice in a book you're fine.

There are tons of exceptions though. Most applicably to this conversation speech that can threaten or cause physical harm is not protected.

There's the famous example that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not protected speech. Threatening someone with violence is not protected, nor is telling someone to jump in a lake if they can't swim.

There are also laws around giving bad advice, which is what legal and medical malpractice is about.

Fire in a crowded theater is a famous exception. It’s also from a 1919 case that was subsequently overruled as the Supreme Court broaded free speech protections after WW2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

Suppose you have 1000 such books today. Suppose each court case takes 1 year to resolve with 100% success probability (far, far too optimistic of an assumption). Suppose Amazon goes to court, and 1 year from now, all these books are taken down.

In the meantime, within that year, 1000 more authors create books like this. By the end of the year you have 1000 resolved cases and 1000 new cases. This can continue forever, with the result that 1000 books are always available for sale.

You might say, the authors could be penalized so as to scare new authors away from this. However, the probability that a court will impose sufficiently large fines on the authors is close to zero. Even if they did, many authors could be (or claim to be) based abroad and therefore (in practice) cannot be fined by the US court system.

Do you have any solution to this problem that doesn't involve Amazon acting without a court decision?

If someone sees a problem with my example, please let me know. I am not trying to impose my views on anyone, I'm genuinely trying to understand the mechanisms at play, the concerns, and the possible solutions.

Words cannot cause physical harm.

If your doctor gives you advice, which if followed, caused you physical harm, not only have they opened themselves up to a malpractice lawsuit, their advice caused harm.

Ok but this isn't censorship related.

I don't see a problem. A court decision is preceded by a fair argument between two parties. Any other way is gravitating toward the way of bolsheviks snatching the power and shooting who they believed were cause of evil. (Which was fast and very efficient; do you like it?) The point is not to achieve the desired outcome quickly, but to deal with situation in the right way.

You're right that the faster you try to solve a problem, the more likely you are to solve it badly. Where is the right trade off?

At one extreme lie revolutionary fanatics destroying lives. At the other, a gigantic bureaucracy that watches passively while the lives it's supposed to protect are being destroyed.

IMO the answer depends on the nature of the problem. It would be unwise to require a court order before police is allowed to shoot down an armed assailant killing people in the street. It would be unwise to allow police without a court order to break into any house they suspect of illicit activities.

I don't have a strong argument about this particular situation. I can comfortably argue that the courts will not solve the problem at all. But you can respond that solving the problem through private corporations puts us on a dangerous path. You can say that the fix is so dangerous that it's better to leave this problem alone despite the deaths it causes. I would admit that your criticism is valid.

Ultimately, it seems the choice here will be completely subjective, based on personal preferences about the importance of free speech versus the importance of saving human lives, and other similar factors. I cannot see a realistic solution that most reasonable people will be comfortable with.

...and how is that "company that provides a platform for commerce" supposed to protect its business, if it is not allowed to sever ties with entities that it deems to harm its own brand and reputation?

You seem to be opining for a kind of libertarian idealism and at the same time asking Amazon to be "socially responsible". How is it supposed to work?

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