Reddit Writes A Law: First Draft Of The Free Internet Act Emerges

Looks like the vandals have taken their toll... Instead of open google doc, this should be a git repo.

edit: Created one: https://github.com/bradherman/Reddit-Free-Internet-Act

> Censorship is only permitted if content is found to be illegal content in accordance with this treaty.

> All false information stored to misguide, scam, cause damage, trap users financially, or mutilate collateral are illegal content.

The italicized text concerns me. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because I can easily imagine an unscrupulous politician claiming (for instance) that arguments critical of government economic policy are "false" and are intended to "misguide" and "cause damage" to the economy and well-being of the nation.

The Constitution of the United States has been rendered effectively worthless by this very tactic—a couple of its clauses are routinely used to justify anything, because of their less-than-specific wording.

I suspect documents like this are a symptom of the cure rather than the cure itself. They can only be enacted—and can only continue to serve their purpose—as long as the citizens and their politicians support the documents' causes.

I have a preference for "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" written by John Perry Barlow in 1996:

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

It's more inspirational and make it more universal. Just like the "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights"...

Why do they want to write this sort of stuff in stuffy 19-th century pseudo-legalese?

Cant they just have a plain speech normal copy and let this be translated into proper referenced legal documents (for various jurisdictions) by people who know what they are doing?

Ok, I can't keep track of the chaos. I made this if its useful to anyone. You know what to do. https://github.com/mgirouard/free-internet-act

Very interesting that Reddit could really be emerging as a force for good on the internet...not just a bunch of time-wasting, cry babies. Don't mean to be harsh, but while there is some good stuff, there is a lot of just time-burning stuff.

That being said, if they are able to marshal the productive collective and produce actual legislation that can work - that would be very interesting.

I wonder if legislation ever written by 'non-legislators' has ever been passed into law.

Is that even legal?

Here's a question - is there any piece of Javascript you would wack into a html page which would allow users to query the contact details of their representatives? It would be good if this was as international as possible (though in some countries it would be impossibl).

Neat idea, but the current version of the document just looks like a jumble of loosely related points, somewhat like the laundry list of demands that somebody claiming to represent OWS posted on Reddit a few months ago. What does a damage cap on copyright infringement have to do with a general prohibition of censorship? Why does the document suddenly make up an arbitrary definition of derivative content? Closely related items should be placed together, but different topics should be grouped separately.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the way the document so quickly excludes "illegal data" from its purview. So much of the surveillance and censorship measures that people are worried about take place in the name of preventing and/or prosecuting illegal activity. Therefore, the scope of "illegal" must be very carefully defined in order to prevent gaping loopholes. Is downloading child porn "illegal" in the same way that uploading a copyrighted song is "illegal"? At the very least, cases involving damage claims in a civil suit should be distinguished from cases involving criminal prosecution.

Also, basing damages on the retail price of copyrighted works, multiplied by the number of copies produced, seems odd to me. If you upload 0.8% of a copyrighted file to 100 people over BitTorrent, how many copies have you produced? 0.8 copies? What if the infringed work is not on sale in the first place? What happens if you violate an open-source software license?

But I don't hang out on Reddit all that much, so maybe these apparent shortcomings have good reasons behind them?

Full text: http://pastebin.com/7VY4VTLn

This is why we can't have nice things; the message is getting overwritten every few seconds by a kids pasting in goatse and jailbait references. wisdom of the collective is neither when one party is overpowering.

proud of you.. you cat, bacon, narwhal loving bunch of weirdos

It's a nice thought, but the only thing you'll get from large scale group editing & group think is mediocrity, endless confusion and endless debate.

There has never been an amazing piece of 'legislation' drafted by a huge group of people. There's a very good reason why that's the case. Intelligent discourse in which critical differences and conflicts can be sorted out, can't occur at hyper scale because it becomes an echo chamber - all you'll end up hearing is everybody shouting back and forth, resulting in absolutely nothing.

The only way they can do this, if they're serious about it, is through using a representation system, in which a group of people empowers one person to speak, negotiate and resolve on their behalf so that things actually get done.