Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

From a legal point of view the responsibilities are very similar, if not exactly the same. Making Pornhub responsible for user uploaded content would also make Scihub/YouTube/HN responsible for user uploaded content. I'm not aware of any law that classifies porn as some kind of special responsibility (other than in areas where it's banned, i.e. when crossing the US border as a foreigner or in the more sexually repressed countries).

View on HN

The particular Sci-Hub trade-off is one that shouldn't worry you. If Pornhub are made responsible for user uploaded content it won't make any difference to Sci-Hub because they're already flagrantly infringing. It's not a grey-zone user-upload operation, its express purpose is to "remov[e] barriers in the way of science" in defiance of copyright law. It's "black" Open Access (in the sense of the pirate flag) and not something within the reach of US regulators (otherwise it would already be toast).

Perhaps you're right, Scihub is a bad example as the service clearly breaks almost all known forms of copyright law (though it really shouldn't be, in my opinion, but that's just the publication industry having too much control).

> Making Pornhub responsible for user uploaded content would also make Scihub/YouTube/HN responsible for user uploaded content.

1) So what?

2) You'll note of course that HN has no user uploaded content, and even comments are regularly moderated.

> 1)

In practice this means you can't upload anything anywhere safely. Not just to your favourite website, but anything served on your own servers or your home network as well. Imagine the police breaking down your door because a porn bot posted an illegal comment while you were asleep.

> 2)

The moderation of comments actually makes HN responsible for what users type here under certain laws, assuming the moderators fail or choose not to act on illegal content.

If some thread here starts linking and discussing tactics of acquiring child porn then dang needs to act real quick real fast before there's going to be a very unpleasant conversation with some very grumpy police officers, at least in my jurisdiction.

Clearly this is unthinkable on a forum like this, but for any moderator this is a real reason for concern

Reply on news.ycombinator.com