zlacker

>>ColinW+(OP)
Charlie Stross's blog is next.

Liability is unlimited and there's no provision in law for being a single person or small group of volunteers. You'll be held to the same standards as a behemoth with full time lawyers (the stated target of the law but the least likely to be affected by it)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cl...

The entire law is weaponised unintented consequences.

>>amiga3+wc
What standards would you want individuals or small groups to be held to? In a context where it is illegal for a company to allow hate speech or CSAM on their website, should individuals be allowed to? Or do you just mean the punishment should be less?

>>tene80+Ye
The obvious solution is to have law enforcement enforce the law rather than private parties. If someone posts something bad to your site, the police try to find who posted it and arrest them, and the only obligation on the website is to remove the content in response to a valid court order.

>>Anthon+xf
I don't have a strong view on this law – I haven't read enough into it. So I'm interested to know why you believe what you've just written. If a country is trying to, for example, make harder for CSAM to be distributed, why shouldn't the person operating the site where it's being hosted have some responsibility to make sure it can't be hosted there?

>>tene80+wg
For one thing, because that person is not obliged to follow due process and will likely ban everything that even might even vaguely require them to involve a lawyer. See for example YouTube’s copyright strikes, which are much harsher on the uploader than any existing copyright law.

>>manana+Lg
Your argument is that it's better to have the illegal stuff (say, CSAM) online than for a site owner to, for practical reasons, ban a lot of legal stuff too? Why?

>>tene80+bh
That is not the argument. The argument is that, with appropriate court order, a site operator must take down the illegal material (if it hasn’t already been moderated out). However, the site owner should not be liable for that content appearing on their site since it was not put there by them and since there is value in uncensored/unmoderated online communities. The person who posted the content should be liable, not the site owner. In neither case is the content just freely siting there harming the public and unable to be removed because nobody is liable for punishment.

I think an interesting alternate angle here would be to require unmoderated community admins to keep record of real identity info for participants, so if something bad shows up the person who posted it is trivially identifiable and can easily be reprimanded. This has other problems, of course, but is interesting to consider.