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Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

Why does the proposed EU legislation have a 1-hour deadline? No matter what you think of the action it's trying to take, a 1-hour deadline is preposterous for anyone and seems expressly designed to force people to set up an automated process that acts on takedown notices without prior review. But who benefits from this?

About the only thing I can think of is if some big company, think Facebook or Google, lobbied for this because they're large enough that they can actually implement it with review, whereas anyone smaller can't.

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I think the idea of the 1 hour deadline is to pull it offline before others can download and repost it. The police/governments especially in Australia and New Zealand have worked out that there is simply no way to remove a file from the internet if someone else grabs it in time.

Its a fruitless effort and very dangerous when misused but thats what I assume they are trying to do anyway.

And what's the chance that it gets reported before someone's downloaded it?

I'd say about none.

I'm in New Zealand, and finding the Christchurch shooter's manifesto was harder than you'd think.

The "it's not foolproof, so it's fruitless"-argument strikes me as missing the point. We can't prevent many things from happening (rape, thieving, excessive drug use, etc.) but that doesn't mean that efforts to contain this are useless.

It was very easy to find if you know where to look. If you know the domain for 8chan you could find it in seconds. The massive attempt to hide the video probably made it much easier to find as so many people who saw it saved it expecting it to be gone in the future.

Everything is easy to find if you know where to look.

Yes, if you look hard enough, you can find anything. But I think the idea is to make it so that the bad things don't just continue to float around where people not looking for it might see it.

Just like terrorist content (how to make bombs/attack infidels and such) still exists, and those looking for it would probably find it, but the governments are trying to make it so that innocent people that have no inclination to perform horrible acts don't run into it by "chance". And just like they did to Muslim extremists and violent ideas in that front, they are now trying to do in other areas.

I've been on the Internet my entire life and not even once I've seen something I didn't want or expect to see. It's simply not possible to force people to watch a several minutes long video or read a manifesto with dozens of pages, so I don't understand this sentiment.

It was (is) one search away on the famous bay of pirates.

By the time the government can find and report it, surely other people will have found it already.

Because Christchurch.

(Which postdates the first draft of this directive. But there were similar cases before)

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