Why should the EFF be primarily influenced by public opinion? The public is often ignorant or apathetic about electronic surveillance and privacy invasion, or else they welcome the panopticon with open arms because corporate and propaganda have successfully manufactured their consent.
And as the article states, laws already exist to address the issue. To simply assume this law would be interpreted or executed in good faith, especially given the current American political climate, seems naive.
The point of this article is there are insufficient safeguards against fraudulent take-down notices. There isn't even the theoretical safeguard that the DMCA has.
There is no downside to the person making a frivolous claim, and there is a very aggressive deadline for compliance, meaning that sites will just go ahead and insta-delete anything anyone files a complaint against.
Did you even read the article? They're not claiming there is actually anything wrong with requiring operators to take down NCII. In fact they say 48 states already have laws to do this.
Their issue is that with a 48 hour window and pretty loose definitions of what must be taken down, it's going to lead to smaller companies just taking down anything at all that someone files that claim for. Even bigger companies might just err on the side of caution and take down anything flagged, the way they once did with DMCA notices. That system was abused for quite some time.
Consensual adult porn, for instance, is legal here and protected by the First Amendment. What if your porn company's rival just files that notice on you? Can Pornhub adjudicate every dispute in 48 hours?
What happens with a claim made against any communication that is end-to-end encrypted and thus unviewable by the operator? Etc.
"The takedown provision applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the bill. The takedown provision also lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests. Lawful content—including satire, journalism, and political speech—could be wrongly censored. "
> What happened to EFF in the past few years? Seems like they're increasingly taking stances that are on the wrong side of public opinion.
What's happened to the public in the past few years? Seems like they're increasingly easily fooled into supporting dumb knee-jerk responses that will have obvious, extremely destructive (hopefully) unintended consequences.
I usually don’t get outraged at bills that are not laws yet, but…
The Congress webpage says it has already passed the Senate and has 20 cosponsors, roughly even from each party.
It passed in the last Senate with a voice vote, which means it had overwhelming support.
Thankfully, it being in the previous Senate means that the bill has to start over. Hopefully, the increased scrutiny will lead to amendments or killing the bill.
With Trump essentially admitting that he intends to abuse it, I have a bad feeling that it’ll pass with a party line vote.
I’ve heard this argument and seen the pearl clutching about every Internet bill that has ever been considered. They whip Internet activists into a frenzy. None of it has borne out once the bills have become law. It’s Chicken Little every time.
Laws are designed to have an effect, that is their purpose. However, the changes did not live up to the hysteria. Most of the doomsday predictions were so embarrassing in retrospect that the original articles have since been taken down.
The GDPR has had huge and shitty impact on the entire internet. It's night and day with cookie banners on every website. DMCA has pros and cons. But it's clear the lack of real penalties for bogus copyright notifications leads to abuse.
GDPR is fine. The only annoying thing about it is the petulant malicious compliance banners that some sites started using in response. Unfortunately it didn’t destroy the ad/tracking based internet, but that was probably too optimistic.
I don't know who said "destroy" but COPPA and the DMCA have had a lot of negative effects. And some positive ones too, but it's hard to argue they succeed in their objectives at all really, and easy to see the harms.
DMCA alone reshaped the internet, with DMCA copyright
notices becoming a shady industry of supression and fear.
GDPR is the source
of all those "mandatory cookie consent" banners
that Firefox now has builtin features to detect them.
COPPA besides making websites either ban children or become "family-friendly", led to this corporate scheme: `A small fee was charged by Microsoft under COPPA as a way to verify parental consent. The fee was donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.[48] Google, however, charges a small fee as a way to verify one's date of birth. `( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot... )
There's another circumstance where people were calling out threats and mostly no one cared - the recent presidential election. it's difficult to argue nothing will change when on occasion it does.
45 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadThere's no penalty for crazy/spam requests, but you're destroyed if you ever miss one.
And as the article states, laws already exist to address the issue. To simply assume this law would be interpreted or executed in good faith, especially given the current American political climate, seems naive.
There is no downside to the person making a frivolous claim, and there is a very aggressive deadline for compliance, meaning that sites will just go ahead and insta-delete anything anyone files a complaint against.
Their issue is that with a 48 hour window and pretty loose definitions of what must be taken down, it's going to lead to smaller companies just taking down anything at all that someone files that claim for. Even bigger companies might just err on the side of caution and take down anything flagged, the way they once did with DMCA notices. That system was abused for quite some time.
Consensual adult porn, for instance, is legal here and protected by the First Amendment. What if your porn company's rival just files that notice on you? Can Pornhub adjudicate every dispute in 48 hours?
What happens with a claim made against any communication that is end-to-end encrypted and thus unviewable by the operator? Etc.
"The takedown provision applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the bill. The takedown provision also lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests. Lawful content—including satire, journalism, and political speech—could be wrongly censored. "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43290002
What's happened to the public in the past few years? Seems like they're increasingly easily fooled into supporting dumb knee-jerk responses that will have obvious, extremely destructive (hopefully) unintended consequences.
Thankfully, it being in the previous Senate means that the bill has to start over. Hopefully, the increased scrutiny will lead to amendments or killing the bill.
With Trump essentially admitting that he intends to abuse it, I have a bad feeling that it’ll pass with a party line vote.
The broader issue with GDPR is the benefit it gives incumbents over startups.
Now it's obvious of course.
GDPR is fine. The only annoying thing about it is the petulant malicious compliance banners that some sites started using in response. Unfortunately it didn’t destroy the ad/tracking based internet, but that was probably too optimistic.
GDPR is the source of all those "mandatory cookie consent" banners that Firefox now has builtin features to detect them.
COPPA besides making websites either ban children or become "family-friendly", led to this corporate scheme: `A small fee was charged by Microsoft under COPPA as a way to verify parental consent. The fee was donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.[48] Google, however, charges a small fee as a way to verify one's date of birth. `( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot... )
CDA and its derivatives, striped much of section 230 protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sec...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43290002
The Take It Down Act isn't a law, it's a weapon
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43293573