Comment by laughinghan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laughinghan | Hacker News Reader

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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

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?

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.

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