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Comment by naiveai | Hacker News Reader

Why is this happening? I see the argumnent that these organizations are private companies and can do whatever they see fit, including censorship, I see no reason why these should not be opposed on principle. Global expression of ideas should not be controlled by any one jurisdiction or board of directors.

When will we ever find a solution? Decentralisation is fun to talk about but almost impossible to accomplish in practice. So how do we create a compromise scenario that protects the free spread of ideas? I have no idea. I am so sick of all this.

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It's happening because the USA has declared it illegal for any website to knowingly host any content that might be illegal.

As such they're pulling down anything and everything that might be even possibly illegal.

what about websites which are not hosted in the US, but for instance, in europe or asia?

This law wouldn't be in effect for them?

At least CJEU has ruled that austrian company running uk-hosted website is liable for damages due to copyright infringements occuring in france [1].

http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2015/02/11/cjeu-mere-ac...

It would if the USA has an extradition agreement in place, which we do with a majority of countries. So while you do not commit a crime domestically, if an American can access illegal content on your site, you can be sued in the USA and extradited.

You can't be extradited for purely civil matters.

@singularity2001 yes, Kim dotcom with MegaUpload

No its location of server that did it for Megaupload.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/12/28/extradition-juris...

In short, much of Megaupload’s servers were located in the U.S. This, for the purpose of jurisdiction, means two things. First, much of the alleged crimes took place physically in the United States. The infringements, the payments, etc. took place, at least in large part, in Virginia even if the people orchestrating it were scattered all over the world.

More importantly though, courts in both the U.S. and now New Zealand have ruled that these servers provide sufficient contact with the U.S. to give it jurisdiction over the criminal case. While jurisdiction alone doesn’t mean a person can be extradited, it’s a crucial step and this also explains why a man who never set foot in the U.S. can be extradited to it for a crime committed online.

However, this isn’t the first time the U.S. has used the server argument it’s been using it for years to combat securities fraud in the country.

> First, much of the alleged crimes took place physically in the United States. The infringements, the payments, etc. took place, at least in large part, in Virginia even if the people orchestrating it were scattered all over the world.

This logic is twisted and does not follow at all, except if you have a purely old world way of thinking (i.e. pre-internet), or are morally flexible when it suits your narrative.

The lesson is clear though, stay away from American servers.

are there cases when this really happened?

> the USA has declared it illegal for any website to knowingly host any content that might be illegal

Which law is this and when did it go into effect?

There isn't exactly a global shortage of cloud storage providers, so the solution seems pretty simple. Just never store your files in only one place.

Rather, never store any potentially problematic content in a storage service with a legal entity behind it.

Store encrypted chunks strewn across multiple nodes, so that each node can reliably deny knowledge, or even possession of a full copy, of the content. So they can't be sued.

This, of course, prevents making this content from being accessible to public.

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