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Comment by testuser2131 | Hacker News Reader

Making content providers liable about the content they publish seems to me essential to have an healthy internet: I don't understand all the problem about censorship; Am I missing something?

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You are missing the "user content" part.

If I anonymously upload copyrighted material to YouTube, I can sue YouTube. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Pinterest, Imgur, Instagram, ... .

I'm building a platform where anyone can make a game and share it. If someone names his game "Zelda" or "Tetris", I can get sued. If my competitor uploads his own material to my site, they can sue me.

Theses platforms should have "automated filters that detect copyrighted material, and make a distinction between original and parody". If you know of such system, please tell me.

Staying in Europe with a user content platform makes no sense.

If the user is anonymous, so as copyright holder, or target of harassment or whatever I can't know who is the creator of the content, it makes perfectly sense for me that you, as host of the content are liable of the content itself. I don't see anything strange about it.

The problem is that the new law punishes the platform for hosting the content even when they didn't know they were hosting it. This creates a chilling effect, as they will need to review and block preventatively any dubious content.

Previously it was enough that they removed the content when they were notified about it; this didn't create such huge chilling effect for most content.

It means that what you are doing now, posting a comment using a throwaway, will be impossible.

As no public platform will take this risk and users don't want to pay the extra money the platform needs to build or buy the impossible content filters it would need.

You own small a grocery store, and as an altruistic service to the community you provide a public bulletin board at the store entrance. Town residents can use this to share public messages and advertisements. Someone with no relation to you anonymously pins a poster with copyrighted images to the bulletin board at the entrance.

You originally had no idea the images were not the property of the creator of the poster (how could you?), but as soon as you are made aware of the problem you remove the poster in a timely manner.

Does it make perfect sense to you that I (owner of the images) can now successfully sue you (the owner of the store and provider of the bulletin board service) for copyright infringement, and have you pay damages to me as compensation for the time the poster was visible at the bulletin board?

More importantly, do you think making the store owner vulnerable to litigation is 1. in line with how similar laws usually work? 2. a fair administration of justice? 3. a net benefit to the town and society at large?

If someone spray paints "Trump is a moron." on your house and you cannot tell who has done this, why should you be liable for this public insult?

> Theses platforms should have "automated filters that detect copyrighted material, and make a distinction between original and parody". If you know of such system, please tell me.

That's the whole point in this useless proposed jurisdiction. Such automated filters cannot exist and will never exist. We don't have strong AI which is trained to detect copyright violations, and there never will be one. Such a system would first to know what a protectable work is (in all possible formats). Then it would have to detect violations (in all possible formats). And then it needs to be available to all internet platforms which allows user content, such as e. g. Wikipedia, hackernews or reddit. This is even impossible to implement for Facebook or Google. So why changing a perfectly fine copyright law to something not implementable?

Everybody needs to geoblock EU clients, even every little block with a comments section.

Consider the difference "making content providers liable for the content they publish" vs "making platforms liable for the content others publish".

Yes, but currently content providers are making money (not in case of wikipedia, I know) over content that could be against the law (it could be hate speech, harassment, copyright infringement or whatever). For example how are online content providers any difference from traditional newspapers, where the director is accountable for all content published in the newspaper?

I believe that people should be responsible for what they do, not for what other people do. That is the key difference between the traditional media and platforms - traditional newspapers are under your control, written by your employees, you are able to read all the articles before you publish them etc. A platform is something you create for other people to use it. If we accept that platforms should be responsible for what their users do, where do we draw the line? If I slander you over the phone, should phone company be responsible for it? Using your argument, they made money on that slanderous call so they should be, is that right?

If content providers in the online medium are to be the same to traditional providers like newspapers internet as we know it won't be any longer and we will have just that, online traditional newspapers.

Making money by breaking the law should not be allowed I agree. But currently these laws (copyright) are more due for a refactoring than the medium (internet) itself. As these laws are not well balanced between all parties involved, especially with all the possibilities in the current age.

The flaw in your reasoning is in "user generated content". Newspapers are not user generated, while lots of websites (like this one) are. That's why safe harbor conditions exist, allowing sites like these to have free and meaningful discussion, without the threat of massive fines or lawsuits because a single user may do something irresponsible.

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