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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Of course. That's what courts are in the USA -- they determine which speech is protected as free speech, and which is not (eg defamation, fraud, perjury, copyright infringement, threats, etc).

But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.

Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.

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> But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.

Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves.

The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.

It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself.

The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.

And yet a fast system was invented for copyright protection online. Was the DMCA wrong?

And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat?

The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA.

Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?

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