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Comment by cmelbye | Hacker News Reader

They have a Terms of Service, and like (literally) every hosting provider on the planet, they will take down your site if you violate the agreement that you agreed to when you signed up.

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And like every other webhosting provider on the planet they'll have to decide when they think it is time to stand up for their customers and when to let it go.

Suppose you have a newspaper and you want to co-locate, Amazon is suddenly no longer an option.

Really, the speed and ease with which they rolled over after some political pressure is quite amazing to me, I had them pegged as 'solid' before.

If they were solid in your experience in the past, perhaps this time there were special mitigating factors in this case we are not aware of, or have not recognized?

One thing that pops to mind is WikiLeaks was promising to expose the secrets of all big businesses everywhere. It makes no sense whatsoever for Amazon to support someone promising to do that, unless Amazon has no secrets they wish to keep.

It was somewhat craven of them, on the other hand; I can see it from their point of view Senator Lieberman can make life very difficult for them vis-a-vis local sales tax charged on goods sold across state lines. In my mind Amazon is reacting in a way that protects their short-term interests but they do not realize that they have now given a clear signal that they will cave to pressure.

esp considering that they spent a few days defending the child pedo guide on the grounds of free speech

The Guardian used Amazon to host the app they built that allowed readers to filter through and flag the Afghan war logs. No takedown from Amazon there!

Hypocrites.

Even the Neo Nazis have a right to free speech. And they're despicable too. That does not mean that free speech as such is wrong, just that some speech is reprehensible.

"I hate Illinois Nazis."

There is a school of thought that once Nazis are invoked, the argument is automatically forfeit by whomever issued the remark.

BS, if they hosted the NYT and the NYT posted a leaked document, they wouldn't take them down. It all depends on power relations, perceived legitimacy, etc.; the only thing it has nothing to do with is their terms of service.

I too think Amazon wouldn't have taken down the NYT.

On the other hand, had WL not violated the AWS AUP, I also don't think Amazon would have taken them down, either.

The point is, if you don't violate the Amazon ToS, this is a non-issue (outside of personal politics, which is a fine reason not to do business with them, but a bit out of scope for this discussion.)

What exactly was the violation of the ToS again? Honest question, I really don't know.

At any rate, I'd amend your "if you don't violate the ToS" to "if you don't attract a phone call from a cranky old senator's office", since that's what seems to have prompted the action.

The violation was cited as being that Wikileaks does not own the content they posted.

Those who don't know history...:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

If you post public-domain material to your site, you don't "own, or otherwise control all the rights" to it. There is no jurisprudence that says posting public-domain material isn't exactly what Wikileaks did. (People with security clearance have been successfully prosecuted for publicly leaking/publishing classified information; no recipient lacking security clearance ever has)

If the rest of the TOS is full of stuff like that, it would be doubtful it would even be possible to run a significant site without in some way violating the TOS. According to that TOS, one user-submitted comment of copyrighted content and your website could immediately be permanently pulled, even if you took the comment down as fast as humanly possible.

[if] one user-submitted comment of copyrighted content and your website could immediately be permanently pulled, even if you took the comment down as fast as humanly possible.

Does that sound credible to you? Does that seem like a reasonable comparison? I'm done arguing about WL on a thread about a new Amazon web service now.

No, it doesn't sound credible. Add back in "according to that TOS" and it does again.

>If you post public-domain material to your site, you don't "own, or otherwise control all the rights" to it.

I think you'll find that you do.

You own that copy that you are presenting for distribution, no one else owns it nor has rights over it, you do (at least in copyright terms, PD could still have trademark and other issues).

The right to prevent other people copying it is exhausted, there is no [copy]right there to own so it's not a legal right that you don't have. That other people own other copies and have control of all the available rights to their copies is immaterial.

That said I think you're clutching at straws classified documents are not in the public domain unless they have been published by someone with the right to do so and the copyright term in the relevant jurisdiction has expired.

There are about 30 states IIRC that aren't signatories to Berne Convention or relevant parts of TRIPS, etc..

Right, except Wikileaks did not violate the TOS. Classified material cannot, by law, be copyrighted. Once leaked, it is public domain. Amazon's claim otherwise was completely disingenuous and dishonest.

Amazon never once mentioned copyright. (Please, help yourself to the last word.)

Pedantry doesn't suit this discussion well. You are correct that the word copyright was not specified. What was specified was that they hosted content they do not own.

By this standard, I fully expect AWS to terminate services to EVERY SINGLE forum, review site, message board, webmail service, and any other site that does not explicitly state in their own terms of service that every byte of user-generated content is the exclusive property of the site itself.

In addition, I expect any AWS customer hosting IETF RFCs, software with public domain licenses, and public domain poetry to be shut down immediately.

If AWS fails to do this, they are being discriminatory and capricious in pursuing TOS violations.

Your reply seems pedantic as well. All your examples have implicit or explicit permission from the authors for the sites to post their material, as I'm sure you're well aware of.

The agreement states you must "own or otherwise control all rights to the content". Merely having permission to display the content is not sufficient.

If I were to be cynical, I'd say that the purpose of that clause is to allow Amazon to take down any site they want and have a credible excuse. Realistically it's probably just some over-zealous lawyer, but either way it has that very effect (as Amazon has demonstrated).

Humans generally argue to seek truth or status or both. It's a disaster that status-seeking gets involved in the process of truth-seeking, and I wish that we all would recognize that and avoid it when we can (to the extent that we can). "Please, help yourself to the last word" strikes me as motivated by status competition.

It's not.

Try taking the words at their face value, instead. The motivation is avoiding another 20-comment thread that spends 70% of its time dancing around the subtext of one commenter liking WL and the other commenter not liking WL.

Try what Wikipedia tries to do: Assume Good Faith. There are people on HN I, too, have a hard time doing that with, so if you're not assuming good faith because of a 'tptacek issue, please feel free to email me about it.

Yeah, OK. Try this, "disclosure does not equate to declassification".

Is classification copyright? I get the feeling that people are conflating the two issues. I don't know if classification goes with copyright but my general sense is that they aren't linked.

I'd say disclosure of classified information presents a greater risk than distributing copyrighted materials. I really don't think "copyright" is the issue at all here.

What saddens me is that people are parroting this "violated ToS" line without even thinking about it. It doesn't matter whether you support WL or not; but at least do the bare minimum and _think_ about what you're writing? Where in the ToS does it say that "site can't host classified information" ? And why hasn't NYT's access be pulled yet, because NYT is serving the _same_ documents ?

Here's a fact: US Government publications can't be copyrighted. Period.

So while Amazon tries to hide behind these lies, they're also busy making money off of books about similar "leaks", like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, etc.

Books and newspapers are protected by the First Amendment, maybe?

Its not clear that wikileaks.org, self-publishing is "the press". Does Lovell v. City of Griffin hold? I don't know. Do you?

And neither does Amazon. And yet they claim to.

Replace "Terms of Service" with "beliefs" and "ethics" and see if that comment just sounds a little weird? :)

Everyone has different opinions (Terms of Services), but why can we not judge someone on those?

I'd expect Amazon to at least wait for a court order before just shutting down a client like that.

Me too, and in that case I would not have a problem with it.

It's not as if they didn't know what wikileaks was up to before this happened.

Yes, thank you! Amazon could've easily told them they're going to wait for a court order since that is what's needed to prove Wikileaks was in the wrong here. Clearly, they shouldn't have rejected them as fast as they did when it was sucha controversial issue.

Even the paedophile book lasted longer than Wikileaks on Amazon. This should speak volumes about the political pressure Amazon was under when Lieberman called.

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