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Comment by monkeypizza | Hacker News Reader

My father had a 6 year old paid flickr account with 30k photos, 2m+ views, shut down without warning or explanation.

It contained tons of original genealogical research, macro shots of plants, photographs of family-related newspaper stories... And possibly some videos with copyrighted music clips.

It's a shame how far we've fallen from traditional justice, which involves:

1. right to confront your accuser, 2. right to legal representation, 3. knowing the charges and evidence against you 4. right to call witnesses and present evidence 5. judgement by your peers

I know, flickr owns the servers, they make the rules etc.

But as human beings, and as a company, I think it's a mistake for them to behave this way.

The feeling of injustice is really powerful, and I think everyone would be better served if companies didn't disregard it.

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I agree that they are making a big mistake causing those feelings of rage and helplessnes.

But the rights you list are rights we have in court. We never had any right to representation in an internal procedure of some private company.

If our access to essential digital facilities ends up being dominated by a handful of global companies, these companies will be regulated like traditional facilities if they don't start regulating themselves in a sensible way very quickly.

Resolving conflicts, finding out what the truth is in a particular case, all of that costs money. We will either pay it in taxes or as part of a purchase we make.

Flickr is yahoo's toy, if they get pissed off they can take it home and deprive everyone of the game; it's still legal to be a jerk.

The whole world used to be that way, though - kings owned everything and if you didn't like it, die - but it pissed people off so bad, they took back the rights to what really was the king's property.

The real problem seems to be how easy it is to enter into extremely unjust agreements online.

In the real world, it's not easy to sign a contract giving up all your future rights - imagine if a car company tried to slip clauses into a car purchase agreement giving them the right to take back the car without explanation at any time. People would rebel. But online, people regularly click through things just as bad as this.

People act like reputation pressure is enough to stop this - but in the real world, not everyone is informed enough to keep up to date on every entity's reputation, and in many places, communities have just taken the shortcut of making certain types of deals illegal, at the expense of the freedom of the seller to make that type of contract.

In the real world, it may even be irrational for people to keep up to date on every entity's reputation. The time it takes to do that isn't exactly without a cost itself.

In Australia, consumer law prevents unfair terms in contracts by the simple expedient of nullifying them.

In general and not just in Australia, terms in contracts that are against the law are null.

You misunderstand... This is if a contract provision that is unfair, and may not be illegal. A court can strike it down, depending on the circumstances.

Not only that, but I think it would be reasonable to require by law that a service must give its users prompt notice of termination and a reasonable timeframe during which they can download the content they created. What happened to your father AFAIC was a crime.

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