> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
dspillett · 6h ago
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
a4isms · 1h ago
To adapt the words of composer Frank Wilhoit:
"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."
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potato3732842 · 2h ago
> Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.
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neilv · 4h ago
Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.
Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.
imtringued · 1h ago
>Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
They won't care to implement it. They'll follow the letter of the law, which means they'll aggressively block anything that gets (falsely) reported, but they certainly won't follow its spirit.
bryanrasmussen · 44m ago
the spirit is to tell the powers that be who the powerless person is who crossed them, the big companies definitely will follow that spirit. It is the very spirit which moves them.
coldtea · 1h ago
Also the kind of system that will absolutely be used by large companies where most of online discussion happens to squash whatever the government doesn't like.
spacecadet · 5h ago
Or a system intended to prevent and identify dissidence by labeling anything as "fake".
No comments yet
ajross · 3h ago
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.
And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.
The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.
cvz · 1h ago
I don't understand this comment. The fine article is about a proposed law that would allegedly require the implementation of half-baked censorship systems along the same lines as the DMCA. Are you saying that's not a real issue because the EFF also whines about big tech?
ajross · 1h ago
I'm saying I'm fed up with the EFF for their silence in the face of genuine disaster, and am treating them like the click farm they've become. Is NO FAKES a bad law? Probably. Do I trust the EFF to tell me that? Not anymore.
They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.
Analemma_ · 1h ago
When you find yourself getting more angry at people saying “hey, this is a really bad law” than at the really bad law, I think you need to step back and take some deep breaths, maybe get off the internet for a while.
This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.
stodor89 · 7h ago
15 years ago that would've been outrageous. But at this point they're just kicking a dead horse.
Uvix · 3h ago
Maybe 25 years ago. But that ship sailed with PATRIOT act and friends post-2001.
spacecadet · 4h ago
Surprised/not surprised. When surveillance capitalism is the MO for generations, it just becomes the norm.
Personally, I find the world becoming more and more about fighting for survival while simultaneously fuck you I got mine...
coldtea · 1h ago
They got the left cheering to support censorship in the guise of fighting "fake news" when it had the uppper hand, lest someone hurt someone's feelings.
Now it will be used againt it, and against in right wing dissidents to the establisment fairy tales too.
input_sh · 59m ago
There's a giant difference between supporting changes to the law that allows further censorship and yelling at companies to be consistent about the enforcement of their own terms of service.
One's a law that everyone has to follow, while the other one's a made-up piece of text that the company can change at any point in time if they wish to do so.
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bsenftner · 4h ago
Doesn't all this assume that any such media is being "social media" shared? The language of this strikes me as moot within private communities. Could this be the unrealized "thing we want" and that is the killing of social media?
steveselzer · 1h ago
Thing is we understand at an academic level that this is a platform design issue not some abstract problem about free speech or personal responsibility.
The solution is to demand governments force social media companies to implement algorithmic friction coefficients.
It’s simply that the economic incentives involved mean there is no political will to make it happen.
The ruling class benefits from the chaos, division and confusion as perpetuated by social media in its current form. They like it just fine the way it is now.
Some Research:
Aral & Eckles (MIT, 2019): Introducing friction reduces misinformation spread without limiting freedom of expression.
• Mozilla & Stanford Studies (2020–2022): Friction (such as unsharing prompts) reduces fake news virality by up to 50%.
• Twitter’s 2021 experiments: Users changed or deleted tweets 25% of the time when shown fact-check prompts before posting.
zulban · 4h ago
Good luck defining social media in legislation.
bsenftner · 4h ago
That's my point, this legislation does not define social media at all, but it sure as hell makes being a social media site harder.
harvey9 · 2h ago
So all the images need to go through replica filters but ai makes it trivially easy to make substantially different images from a single prompt so now we need an ai to infer the 'meaning' of an image. It all sounds like great news for chip makers and power generators.
adolph · 1h ago
It seems like one approach is to oppose such a law, but that is playing defense and will eventually lose.
Another approach would be to develop OSS that fulfilled the basic requirements in a non-tyrannical manner that supports people who create things. There was the example of Cliff Stoll on this site just yesterday. It is objectively wrong for someone to mistreat his creative work in that way.
What would httpd for content inspection look like? Plagiarism detection? Geo-encoded fair use?
mschuster91 · 8h ago
> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
You already need point a) to be in place to comply with EU laws and directives (DSA, anti-terrorism [1]) anyway, and I think the UK has anti-terrorism laws with similar wording, and the US with CSAM laws.
Point b) is required if you operate in Germany, there have been a number of court rulings that platforms have to take down repetitive uploads of banned content [2].
Point c) is something that makes sense, it's time to crack down hard on "nudifiers" and similar apps.
Point d) is the one I have the most issues with, although that's nothing new either, unmasking users via a barely fleshed out subpoena or dragnet orders has been a thing for many many years now.
This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies. They can afford to hire proper moderation staff to handle such complaints, they just don't want to because it impacts their bottom line - at the cost of everyone affected by AI slop.
This is one of those cases where the need to "do something" is strong, but that doesn't excuse terrible implementations.
Especially at a time when the US is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
marcus_holmes · 6h ago
The EU has a different approach to this kind of regulation than the USA [0]. EU regulations are more about principles and outcomes, while US regulation is more about strict rules and compliance with procedures. The EU tends to only impose fines if the regulations are deliberately being ignored, while the US imposes fines for any non-compliance with the regs.
So while you can compare the two, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to squint a bit.
The DMCA has proven to be way too broad, but there's no appetite to change that because it's very useful for copyright holders, and only hurts small content producers/owners. This looks like it's heading the same way.
> This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies.
I don't see any exemptions for small businesses, so how do you conclude this?
Yeah one thing the EU as well as most local European courts care about is showing good faith, not just to the court but also to the other party. (Due to how US law works, this isn't quite the case in the US: respect for the court is enforced, respect for the other party isn't required.)
One of the big reasons why CJEU is handing out massive fines to the big tech companies is because of the blatant non-compliance to orders from local courts and DPAs by constantly demanding appeals to them and refusing to even attempt to do anything until CJEU affirms the local courts (and usually ramping up the fines a bit more at that). It's a deliberate perversion of the judicial process so that GAFAM can keep violating the law by delaying the proper final judgement. They'd not have gotten higher fines if they just complied with the local courts while the appeal was going on; that'd be a show of good faith, which European courts tend to value.
anon0502 · 7h ago
As I understood, it propose for broad filter so more content which should fall under "fair use" will now be take down faster.
> not your small mom-and-pop startup
not sure why you said this, it's the artists / content makers that suffer.
johngladtj · 8h ago
None of which is acceptable
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privatelypublic · 8h ago
Slippery slope. See how far we've fallen.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
And yet, why are we here? It would seem some bad actors have lead us to the now familiar, "That's why we can't have nice things." (It's as though permissiveness and anonymity have a slippery slope as well.)
You can hate the legislation, but it would be nice to hear some alternative ideas that go beyond, "We just have to accept all the horrific stuff that the bad actors out there want to throw onto the internet.
ls612 · 7h ago
Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of information and computation (and therefore control) becoming cheap. Liberal political systems can no longer survive in equilibrium. The 21st century will be a story either of ruling with an iron fist or being crushed beneath one :(
rightbyte · 7h ago
Information is as expensive as always it is just copying it that is cheap.
Xelbair · 7h ago
is it? it was always easier and faster to spew bullshit than to refute it, and now we can automate it.
rootlocus · 6h ago
Information, disinformation, what's the difference?
anonym29 · 4h ago
One's the kind that affirms existing worldviews, the other asks questions that makes TPTB uncomfortable, like Copernicus's questions about geocentrism.
jasonjayr · 3h ago
Disinformation is not grounded in any observable evidence, and often has no basis in reality or is just wild speculation.
For example, anonym29, when did you stop beating up your partner?
anonym29 · 1h ago
The term 'disinformation' is also used by TPTB to discredit information that is grounded in observable evidence that goes against narratives that TPTB prefer to maintain.
Accordingly, every single declaration of "misinformation" must be critically evaluated according to available evidence, as the claim itself has been weaponized by bad-faith, self-serving interests of those in positions of power and authority.
The "experts" are frequently wrong, and are not inherently trustworthy. Not every word that slips past their tongue is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are humans, and like the rest of humans, they lie, they mislead, they are wrong, and some of them and can and do attempt to abuse social consensus mechanisms, including ostracization, to bend public discourse in their favor.
dathinab · 5h ago
there is a huge difference between having strict laws and enforcing them and "ruling with the iron fist"
the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people
speeder · 5h ago
That is always same thing.
All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"
I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:
You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine.
Person refuses to pay fine.
So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine.
Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything.
So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay.
They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them.
So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.
Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"
mystraline · 3h ago
Murder by cop only applies to the individual.
Never in the history of our country, was a company that openly flaunted the law, and was murdered by cop or judge.
What's the saying? "I'll believe in the death penalty when they kill a corporation in Texas"
dathinab · 2h ago
> Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
if a iron fist rule you shoot them, but sooner or later you will end up with situations where their brother will shoot you, or there is a uprising and they lynch the police chef etc. no one wins
in country with strict rules but no iron fist rule the police person who tries to shoot someone who doesn't pose danger for other just because they try to avoid arrest by running away will lose their job
> involve killing people in the end
this is such a misleading dumb fatalistic argument, yes people will get killed, but there is a huge difference between the context.
> You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Sure there are edge cases where you threaten shooting at someone, and sometimes police will have to shoot. But only if there is risk to live. And most crimes don't go that far.
Ray20 · 1h ago
>Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Well, it seems to be the same situation as everywhere: you either obey or be killed. As far as I know, in the EU there is no option to disobey and survive.
Vegenoid · 1h ago
I do not believe that police are permitted to shoot a nonviolent criminal simply because they might escape (in most circumstances). They do have to actually physically apprehend them.
Nursie · 5h ago
In most places, shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
Your whole post falls apart right there.
Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.
Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.
ivell · 4h ago
> shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.
PaulDavisThe1st · 2h ago
But is that a part of the design of the system, or parts of the system not behaving as intended?
ivell · 29m ago
First, would this distinction matter when lives are at stake?
Second, if parts of system does not work as intended, then we should think of how to prevent such situations in the first place.
Where lives are at stake we cannot take a stand "it works on my machine" or "you are not holding it the right way". We need to find solutions to fix or prevent it.
speeder · 5h ago
And how you make sure bailiffs/repo men succeed? For example I know a case in Brazil, that happened in the 70s, where repo men tried to take a Capoeira Master car, and he just grabbed his huge "Peixeira" knife and chased the repo men away. Justice then decided to just let him break the law, because the other choice was send heavily armed cops and hope they would survive the confrontation with the guy and his students.
Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.
Vegenoid · 1h ago
If a criminal uses violence to escape the law, then yes, violence is usually permitted against them (and they have now committed a violent crime).
Physical force is permitted against nonviolent criminals so they can be apprehended, but lethal force is usually not permitted unless the criminal has used or is about to use violence.
Yes, there are of course instances where nonviolent criminals have been killed, with that act of killing being legal under that framework. For example, if a criminal is escaping in a vehicle recklessly and putting the lives of others in danger. Or cases where enforcers are given overly broad latitude in determining what constitutes a threat of violence. Or tyrannical regimes that authorize lethal force for minor infractions.
But it is not the case that most legal systems say “a criminal can be killed if they refuse to submit to punishment, regardless of the severity of their crime”. That is a misconception. People don’t get killed for not paying fines, they get killed for trying to shoot the person that comes to take them to jail for not paying the fine.
amiga386 · 5h ago
All countries exist as distinct entities because they can maintain what Max Weber called the monopoly on violence within their geographic bounds.
In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:
* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.
* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)
* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.
* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.
* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.
* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.
Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.
The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.
To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.
dataflow · 3h ago
> Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?
I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.
To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.
kipchak · 59m ago
Is there a monopoly on coercion? An employer can for example coerce you into coming into the office with the threat of termination, or loss of access, but only the state can (legally) threaten you with violence to coerce you to do so.
Both the state or a private entity seem like they could do the dam example.
dataflow · 41m ago
Depends what you consider coercion I guess. Perhaps if you view it that way there isn't a monopoly, I'm not sure. The way I'd look at it is that you could always quit your job, and you agreed to its terms beforehand anyway, so threatening to fire you is not exactly coercion... it's more like the contract stopping to be in effect. But I'm happy to see it as not-a-monopoly if that feels more sensible. The point I was disputing wasn't the existence of a monopoly on violence by the state, but the connection between that and "all laws are ultimately backed by violence" - I just don't believe every chain ultimately leads to violence, because states can (and do) coerce people in other ways.
amiga386 · 20m ago
This is why the monopoly on violence is often formulated as "the monopoly on legitimate violence" or "legal use of force"
If you you don't pay your drug dealer, he can't take you to court, because his entire business is illegal. So instead he beats you up to get you to comply with his payment demands. If a policeman catches him doing that, the policeman can legally arrest him for the crime of assault, and can legally use force to stop him beating you up.
reverendsteveii · 1h ago
There is no functional difference between behavior coerced by violence and behavior coerced by the threat of violence.
dataflow · 1h ago
And neither is what I wrote. Threatening to destroy a dam or threatening to cut off a building's power is not threatening violence.
reverendsteveii · 1h ago
>a clear and present threat to life
Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.
Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."
>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine
It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.
reverendsteveii · 1h ago
how do you have strict laws and enforce them without violence?
ls612 · 5h ago
And what does “enforcement” mean in your mind? The western censorship regime isn’t being implemented by asking nicely…
Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."
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Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.
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But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.
Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.
They won't care to implement it. They'll follow the letter of the law, which means they'll aggressively block anything that gets (falsely) reported, but they certainly won't follow its spirit.
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This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.
And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.
The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.
They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.
This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.
Personally, I find the world becoming more and more about fighting for survival while simultaneously fuck you I got mine...
Now it will be used againt it, and against in right wing dissidents to the establisment fairy tales too.
One's a law that everyone has to follow, while the other one's a made-up piece of text that the company can change at any point in time if they wish to do so.
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The solution is to demand governments force social media companies to implement algorithmic friction coefficients.
It’s simply that the economic incentives involved mean there is no political will to make it happen.
The ruling class benefits from the chaos, division and confusion as perpetuated by social media in its current form. They like it just fine the way it is now.
Some Research:
Aral & Eckles (MIT, 2019): Introducing friction reduces misinformation spread without limiting freedom of expression. • Mozilla & Stanford Studies (2020–2022): Friction (such as unsharing prompts) reduces fake news virality by up to 50%. • Twitter’s 2021 experiments: Users changed or deleted tweets 25% of the time when shown fact-check prompts before posting.
Another approach would be to develop OSS that fulfilled the basic requirements in a non-tyrannical manner that supports people who create things. There was the example of Cliff Stoll on this site just yesterday. It is objectively wrong for someone to mistreat his creative work in that way.
What would httpd for content inspection look like? Plagiarism detection? Geo-encoded fair use?
You already need point a) to be in place to comply with EU laws and directives (DSA, anti-terrorism [1]) anyway, and I think the UK has anti-terrorism laws with similar wording, and the US with CSAM laws.
Point b) is required if you operate in Germany, there have been a number of court rulings that platforms have to take down repetitive uploads of banned content [2].
Point c) is something that makes sense, it's time to crack down hard on "nudifiers" and similar apps.
Point d) is the one I have the most issues with, although that's nothing new either, unmasking users via a barely fleshed out subpoena or dragnet orders has been a thing for many many years now.
This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies. They can afford to hire proper moderation staff to handle such complaints, they just don't want to because it impacts their bottom line - at the cost of everyone affected by AI slop.
[1] https://eucrim.eu/news/rules-on-removing-terrorist-content-o...
[2] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vizr6424-bgh-renate-k...
Especially at a time when the US is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
So while you can compare the two, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to squint a bit.
The DMCA has proven to be way too broad, but there's no appetite to change that because it's very useful for copyright holders, and only hurts small content producers/owners. This looks like it's heading the same way.
> This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies.
I don't see any exemptions for small businesses, so how do you conclude this?
[0] https://www.grcworldforums.com/risk/bridging-global-business... mentions this but I couldn't find a better article specifically addressing the differences in approach.
One of the big reasons why CJEU is handing out massive fines to the big tech companies is because of the blatant non-compliance to orders from local courts and DPAs by constantly demanding appeals to them and refusing to even attempt to do anything until CJEU affirms the local courts (and usually ramping up the fines a bit more at that). It's a deliberate perversion of the judicial process so that GAFAM can keep violating the law by delaying the proper final judgement. They'd not have gotten higher fines if they just complied with the local courts while the appeal was going on; that'd be a show of good faith, which European courts tend to value.
> not your small mom-and-pop startup
not sure why you said this, it's the artists / content makers that suffer.
No comments yet
You can hate the legislation, but it would be nice to hear some alternative ideas that go beyond, "We just have to accept all the horrific stuff that the bad actors out there want to throw onto the internet.
For example, anonym29, when did you stop beating up your partner?
Accordingly, every single declaration of "misinformation" must be critically evaluated according to available evidence, as the claim itself has been weaponized by bad-faith, self-serving interests of those in positions of power and authority.
The "experts" are frequently wrong, and are not inherently trustworthy. Not every word that slips past their tongue is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are humans, and like the rest of humans, they lie, they mislead, they are wrong, and some of them and can and do attempt to abuse social consensus mechanisms, including ostracization, to bend public discourse in their favor.
the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people
All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"
I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:
You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.
Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"
Never in the history of our country, was a company that openly flaunted the law, and was murdered by cop or judge.
What's the saying? "I'll believe in the death penalty when they kill a corporation in Texas"
if a iron fist rule you shoot them, but sooner or later you will end up with situations where their brother will shoot you, or there is a uprising and they lynch the police chef etc. no one wins
in country with strict rules but no iron fist rule the police person who tries to shoot someone who doesn't pose danger for other just because they try to avoid arrest by running away will lose their job
> involve killing people in the end
this is such a misleading dumb fatalistic argument, yes people will get killed, but there is a huge difference between the context.
> You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Sure there are edge cases where you threaten shooting at someone, and sometimes police will have to shoot. But only if there is risk to live. And most crimes don't go that far.
Well, it seems to be the same situation as everywhere: you either obey or be killed. As far as I know, in the EU there is no option to disobey and survive.
Your whole post falls apart right there.
Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.
Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.
But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.
Second, if parts of system does not work as intended, then we should think of how to prevent such situations in the first place.
Where lives are at stake we cannot take a stand "it works on my machine" or "you are not holding it the right way". We need to find solutions to fix or prevent it.
Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.
Physical force is permitted against nonviolent criminals so they can be apprehended, but lethal force is usually not permitted unless the criminal has used or is about to use violence.
Yes, there are of course instances where nonviolent criminals have been killed, with that act of killing being legal under that framework. For example, if a criminal is escaping in a vehicle recklessly and putting the lives of others in danger. Or cases where enforcers are given overly broad latitude in determining what constitutes a threat of violence. Or tyrannical regimes that authorize lethal force for minor infractions.
But it is not the case that most legal systems say “a criminal can be killed if they refuse to submit to punishment, regardless of the severity of their crime”. That is a misconception. People don’t get killed for not paying fines, they get killed for trying to shoot the person that comes to take them to jail for not paying the fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum
In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:
* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.
* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)
* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.
* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.
* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.
* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.
Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.
The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.
To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.
Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?
I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.
To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.
Both the state or a private entity seem like they could do the dam example.
If you you don't pay your drug dealer, he can't take you to court, because his entire business is illegal. So instead he beats you up to get you to comply with his payment demands. If a policeman catches him doing that, the policeman can legally arrest him for the crime of assault, and can legally use force to stop him beating you up.
Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.
Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."
>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine
It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.