Hacker News Reader

Are you a lawyer? If not, can you point to a legal expert explaining why a court would interpret the law as requiring neutrality, or as waiving the protection in the case of pre-approval or vetting copyright, or as requiring that the immunity is only provided in exchange for supporting free speech?

I read and re-read both the DMCA 17 USC § 512 and Section 230 of the CDA, and as far as I can tell, the DMCA only requires responding "expeditiously" to DMCA takedown notices and court orders, and the CDA has no conditions at all but doesn't protect from copyright liability in the first place.

In fact, the CDA explicitly states that its liability protection DOESN'T require neutrality, and extends to “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected”. See https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

I am a lawyer, and while I know nothing about the law in question (not even close to my specialty), I can tell you that statutes are only half of the story. The other half would be court decisions involving those statutes. We live in a common law country which means that court decisions & precedents act as law themselves. They can't just overturn a statute or ignore it, but every court decision on a statute acts as a further refinement to the law in question.

So we'd have to pull relevant case history. You can't just look at the words in a statute. Each single term of art could have a chain of cases arguing over the specific meaning of that term.

There's a question of if a service which pre-filters (to editorialize) content from a user is actually qualified under 512.c at all -- since the content is no longer at the direction of the user, but at the editorial approval of the service.

An anthology is not exempted under 512.c.

I see. So am I understanding correctly that when you had asserted, in the comment I was replying to, that protections from copyright violations require neutrality in content hosting, you were not referring to settled case law, but rather an untested legal theory that you personally support but that has not been tested in the courts?

> The government recognized this about internet services, and granted them immunity to copyright related suits in exchange for supporting the American value of free speech on their platforms. (This is a law.)

No, it's not. You seem to be mixing an inverted understanding of CDA Section 230 (which was instituted to avoid discouraging host moderation of user content, because prior to 230 exerting any such editorial control risked a host being treated as a publisher rather than distributor, with greater liability exposure for the user content) with the DMCA safe harbor (which, unlike CDA 230, applies to copyright claims.)

> The safe harbor protections from copyright violations for user uploads require neutrality in content hosting, because pre-approval implies you must also vet copyright.

Is this a 'A therefore B' thing due to the way the laws are written, or is this explicitly called out someplace?

> The government recognized this about internet services, and granted them immunity to copyright related suits in exchange for supporting the American value of free speech on their platforms. (This is a law.)

I did a bit of looking (though not a lot) to try and find some sources on this but I wasn't able to really uncover anything that supports this.

Do you have any source available? I'm interested in reading into this idea further, I find it rather fascinating.

Look up Communications Decency Act, Section 230. This is a good primer: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

I read the entirety of the page you linked to. Nowhere I found does it say that neutrality is required for the protection to apply, nor that pre-approval or vetting copyright would waive the protection, nor that the protection is in exchange for supporting free speech. Could you point that out to me?

In fact, it links to another page which states:

        Wow, is there anything Section 230 can't do?
    Yes. It does not apply to [...] intellectual property law

https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

Which directly contradicts your implication that Section 230 is the law that grandparent was referring to when they stated:

    The government [...] granted [internet services] immunity
    to copyright related suits [...] (This is a law.)

Furthermore, Section 230 explicitly states that its liability protection DOESN'T require neutrality, and extends to:

    any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict
    access to or availability of material that the provider or
    user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
    excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable,
    whether or not such material is constitutionally protected

(same link)

Section 230 explained:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/ted-cruz-vs-section-230-misrepre...

> Look up Communications Decency Act, Section 230

Sure, but it (1) doesn't apply to copyright—that's the DMCA safe harbor not the CDA one, and (2) was specifically created to eliminate the added liability web hosts were then subject to if they engaged in content moderation, not to require them to abstain from moderation to secure the safe harbor.

No neutrality is required, only best effort removal of illegal material

https://www.lawfareblog.com/ted-cruz-vs-section-230-misrepre...