Hacker News Reader

Comment by mystraline | Hacker News Reader

This is also why I like Yandex and non-US and non-european search especially in terms of censorship by copyright in the USA.

If you go to Yandex and search "a minecraft movie torrent" the first 6 links are the preprint that variety.com 'claims' were mostly removed. In reality, the only sites deindexed were Google and Bing.

This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.

Weirdly, Russian based companies have less a problem with the free speech the USA kicks us offline for.

View on HN

A more precise conclusion would be: "This shows that US based companies will actively self-censor to avoid getting sued for copyright infringement. Russian-based companies don't have to respect US copyright law, so they have no legal obligation to remove infringing content."

Yes, copyright infringement is not protected speech in the US and you can be held civilly liable for it. Yes, adversarial countries don't enforce each others' laws. So yes, Yandex is a good place for finding pirated works. But that hardly makes it a bastion of "free speech", it just means that they don't have the same legal risks as Google does.

DMCA 1201 indicates that I can be held criminally liable, not just civially, for free speech discussing a method of working around, bypassing, or defeating a perceived "technical measure of prevention".

That alone is violation of the US govt's 1fa restriction purely in the favor of companies.

AFAIK the 1st Amendment is about whether the government can prevent you from speaking, not there are 0 consequences to all speech.

When I think that, I also think, "but isn't it bad to Illegal talking decryption?"

Then I think: Law is ambiguous compared to a logical proof, and can only be seen through cases.

I resolve that I'll be the first to stand up and scream if they deport someone for simply discussing the academics of DVD decryption, and that's enough to make me feel comfortable saying it's okay the DMCA is used to prevent stealing.

> AFAIK the 1st Amendment is about whether the government can prevent you from speaking, not there are 0 consequences to all speech.

1A prevents the government from punishing or compelling speech. it's not absolute - slander and death threats aren't protected, for example - but it's pretty broad. you can publish classified documents, for example. the leaker can be punished, but not the journalist.

1A doesn't just protect your right to speak while somehow not protecting you from arrest for your speech. punishment is how all laws are enforced.

I think the ball is being hidden here while responding to a strawman, here's me waving the ball around high in the air:

I agree: other than innumerable exceptions*, 1st amendment says you don't get punished for just speaking something.

* slander & death threats are scratching the surface, a brief tour of SEC cases alone would leave you with hundreds. Easiest one for you to see why the simplistic view espoused is blinkered, is probably...idk, disturbing the peace.

I apologize for strawmanning, I misunderstood your position. Yes, disturbing the peace is such an example, though like disorderly conduct it's somewhat prone to abuse as a charge.

My position is that 1A ought to protect the publication and discussion of vulnerabilities, encryption algorithms, software etc. as speech. Like how PGP was first published as a book listing the source code on printed pages. Unless a tool has absolutely no redeeming value besides breaking the law.

So I think Switch emulators ought to be protected, if they can be used for some legitimate purpose like benchmarking, homebrew, etc. (minus any copyrighted ROM dumps, of course.) Same with youtube-dlp, same with forensic tools like Ghidra and unpackers.

Yeah somehow I bet that if it’s content highly illegal in Russia it’s going to be very much the other way around.

Yandex only became a Russian company fairly recently, after over 20 years of being based outside of Russia.

It was sold, below market value, to a group of Russian investors last year for the specific purpose of controlling it and suppressing free speech.

Nobody, not a single human being in the entire history of humanity, has ever died because they couldn’t pirate a children’s film.

Many people have died, and continue die, because of Yandex’s cooperation with the FSB in shaping opinion, controlling the dissemination of information, and directly reporting users to the FSB for problematic searches.

Pirating children’s films and controlling the availability of news articles are different tiers of free speech.

Those aren't quite comparable.

How many people have died because of American attempts to 'shape opinion, control the dissemination of information, and directly reporting users to the law enforcement for problematic searches?'

Sure Russia is much worse than the US but Americans are still being persecuted for smoking weed which is just absurd.

Far more people die because of western corps cooperation with western state depts/govts as being stenographers of the IOF/IDF.

> Weirdly, Russian based companies have less a problem with the free speech the USA kicks us offline for.

Yes, Russia, a place always known for enabling free and unrestricted speech.

You’re not seeing some deep commitment to free speech. You’re seeing a company in a foreign country not prioritizing matters that apply to another country around the world.

Don’t confuse one for the other.

> Yes, Russia, a place always known for enabling free and unrestricted speech.

The US is well known for enabling free speech, because you can criticize President Trump without negative consequences. But it's the same in Russia; you can criticize President Trump all you want.

Try criticizing the Ukraine war or Putin

Russia and Putin are not walking around saying they are a land of freedom. The US does. Try publicly criticizing Israel in the US. Try getting due process if you look Hispanic. Even if that means you’re Native American.

Can you please read the comment I was replying to? I'm not interested in discussing a strawman argument or letting people put things in my mouthy I didn't say

Ha, try that as foreigner crossing the border, or just doing a US layover. You'll be treated as criminal. There never was free speech in the US neither

> This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.

For better or for worse, the US only has free speech protection which is binding on the government. Sometimes that's good (you can kick out people who don't behave). Sometimes that's bad (censored media). But even in the cases where it's bad, it's not clear to me that it would be worth it to enact freedom of speech laws that apply to private parties. It seems like the cure might be worse than the disease in that case.

The problem with enforcing "freedom of speech" on private parties is that it essentially the same as infringing the speech of that private party.

The only issue I have is when companies can play both sides and in one breath claim they're neutral for the purpose of section 230 protection, and then in the next breath take part in censorship because it's better for business.

Pick a lane, either lane, but you shouldn't get it both ways

> The only issue I have is when companies can play both sides and in one breath claim they're neutral for the purpose of section 230 protection, and then in the next breath take part in censorship because it's better for business.

The entire point of §230 is to immunize companies for the consequences of that which you decry as censorship (i.e., moderation).

> This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.

I'm a bit confused by this. Are you saying that publishing the text (speech) of a copyrighted book, and then having the link to that text de-indexed, is the equivalent of violating the First Amendment? I assume Google and Bing just treated this as any other copyright violation.

Anytime I am searching for my live TV PPV "linux iso" streams I always pull up Yandex. Same goes for pretty much anything piracy. Even sometimes searching for research/stats that are more "controversial" are often down-ranked in Google and hard to find. Unfortunately there is a lot of political bias I've noticed more and more often in Google Search results, and resorting to Yandex sometimes results in better results.

I personally am a Kagi subscriber as well as find Google's search results in general to be terrible. Censorship/political bias/blogspam/terrible AI results are all the big factors for me switching away from using them much at all.

Russia is just more interested in censoring political speech than going after copyright claims. The same applies to China.

Interesting! Do they also have the Navalny movie?

Going to yandex.com and looking for Navalny gives results.. so too for "Putin's palace", Navalny's team's documentary about the regime's corruption (links to navalny.com and medusa.io).

Isn't Yandex a Dutch-based company now? Then again, searching from within Russia might give different results...

Try using Facebook Messenger to send a link to PirateBay; it's blocked. I find it disgusting that our communication media is controlled by billionaires who've revealed themselves as fuckwits on Jan 20. The same dislike is there for corporations controlling what we can find online... Then again, I really don't mind YouTube refusing the hosting of videos from Covid conspiracy nutters (yes I could be wrong and they could be right, but I guess like every other nutjob, I'm comfortable in my ignorance pretending to be confidence.)

A common misinterpretation of the free speech concept as codified in the 1st amendment.

The 1st amendment gives a freedom of association.

All of these private organizations are choosing not to associate with that content, squarely in line with the 1st amendment. The 1st amendment just says the government won’t criminally sanction anyone for not associating with someone else.

This is in addition to the protections against the government for your speech and expression.

Please.

Its funny how Section 230 goes both advantageous ways for companies, without either of the downsides. But mere mortals, yeah, doesn't end well for us who try.

They respond to DMCA requests and also have anticipatory obedience which is freedom of association

They treat their journalist publications and social media posts differently

So just post torrent links as a social media user if thats what you would like to see

You can't swear on TV between 6am and 10pm, absolute freedom of speech never existed, there are laws about libel, defamation, copyright, inciting crimes, &c.

Grab a megaphone and go sing the national anthem at 2am in the middle of a residential area if you want to learn about freedom of speech

It is a lot crazier when you Google politicians and the search page is clearly curated using the 'right to be forgotten' law in the EU. I don't feel like that was the intention behind the law, but then again, the ones abusing it are the ones who passed it.

The

First

Amendment

Applies

The

Government.

Google

Not

The

Government.

YET

Growth mindset.

Yet the moment google says 'you can't make videos calling for the murder of trans people' suddenly 'mah first amendment' comes out of your cohort's lips.

>Weirdly, Russian based companies have less a problem with the free speech the USA kicks us offline for.

Weirdly you don't realize searching for anything that is against the war in Ukraine will get you thrown in jail in Russia. Mentioning Russia as being in any way superior to the US in terms of freedom of speech is just laughable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com