Censorship Bureau: Difference between revisions

** The large US cinema and music publishers have lobbied to create some very consumer-unfriendly law, including the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Just send in a claim "under penalty of perjury" that some page violates your content, and the content disappears... because, if it doesn't, the upstream provider loses safe harbour against being blamed for the actions of individual users. Of course, in the real world, the supposed penalty of perjury effectively does not exist or is impossible to obtain, so there's no downside at all to submitting frivolous, fraudulent or bogus DMCA notices. The tactic is sleazy but it works.

** Libel laws in various countries have a really dubious history; they originated in medieval times, when knights used them to silence peasants from speaking out against misdeeds the nobles did commit. They've been cleaned up a bit since then, depending on jurisdiction, but in some places they do still err on the side of "guilty until proven innocent". As with other legal chilling effects, the object isn't to deliver justice, it's to silence an opponent by threatening to bankrupt them in legal fees. If one jurisdiction passes a law to dismiss SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation), the magic of "libel tourism" may allow a plaintiff to find or fabricate a pretext to sue in some other jurisdiction with weaker freedom-of-speech protections.

** There's also a "right to be forgotten" in the EU, which can be abused by individuals to remove search engine results which expose wrongdoing in which they engaged in the distant past. Supposedly a privacy issue is claimed to be at stake.

* Search engines are not governments, but they occupy an almost single-point-of-failure position in the network which allows them to do tremendous harm. If the [[Ambulance Chaser]]s can't convince an originating site to remove lawful but damning content, often they will try to coerce Google or the rare few other major search engines to remove that content from their index. There's also a search engine "duplicate content penalty", originally intended to prevent the hundreds of mirror sites (many of which merely crib the entire Wikipedia text, under a free licence) from crowding out unique information in organic search results. These penalties do not distinguish between a "fork" of a project (where the original community decides to take its content and go elsewhere, as "Inciclopedia Libre" at the University of Seville tried when they were dissatisfied with the US owners of Wikipedia) and a mere mirror or copy. This can crush individual on-line communities.