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Comment by skhg | Hacker News Reader

Good luck to them... This was already tried in belgium http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/google-versus-bel... years ago

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Belgium... Ireland... who's next, Andorra?

Frankly, 99.9+% of the world's population can get through their day without learning what happens in Ireland unless and until it affects a country with a more direct impact on their lives. The fact that country will almost certainly have newspapers that aren't actively trying to get blacklisted by search engines is just a nice extra.

Ignorance may certainly be bliss but dismissing something because it presumably didn't happen in America takes that idea a bit too far.

I of course never said anything like that, but it is a sign of how far we've come that it gets read that way. Cast your mind back to 1983 and ask yourself if 1983-you would have felt deprived not knowing the latest from Ireland unless and until a non-Irish news source, like the BBC, picked up on the story. Of course not!

This isn't the 1983 or the BBC, it's 2013 and a niche news aggregator powered by its readers.

If you just want stories that are big enough to be picked up by the BBC, read that instead.

Cast your mind back to 1983 and ask yourself if 1983-you would have felt deprived not knowing the latest from Ireland unless and until a non-Irish news source

Fun fact: What happened in 1983 in Ireland was relevant to India in 2012.

In 1983, Ireland passed a pro-life consitutional amendment, banning abortion in all cases (in practice)¹. In 2012, an dentist from India living in Ireland who was miscarrying and dying asked for a termination to save her life, she was refused one, and eventually died².

¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_of_the_Constit... ²: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar

Yes, if you travel to another country its laws will affect you. Is your claim that if the eighth amendment had been published in Indian newspapers in 1983 that this would not have happened?

The point is not how provincal or remote we are; the point is that this would establish a legal precedent. It's common for legal precedents to be cited across the border between the UK and Ireland; and if this showed up in the UK, it's now able to spread to a lot of other places.

And that'd be just fine for certain well-funded lobbying groups...

But Irish people do, and that's partially the point.

If this can happen in Ireland or Belgium, you can bet that organizations in other countries will consider doing the same thing.

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