The tendency I’m seeing is towards unemployable, frankly. The problem is that anybody looks like crap under a microscope, and the web allows people to turn the microscope on anybody, for any reason, at any time.
And really, how many lives will get damaged while society catches up with the technology? Isn’t the point of law to provide us with a safety net from unreasonable harm?
How do I confirm that it does relate to you?
Let’s say I run a website that hosts videos. And you come to me saying “hey! Take that video down! It’s got pictures of me in it!”
What do I do?
Do I take it down immediately?
Do I get some sort of confirmation? Picture ID?
How do I know that you’re not sending a fake picture to me to take down somebody’s else’s video?
How is any of this “simple”?
It’s not simple in the physical world (“go to all of the libraries and cut out the articles”) and it’s not simple in the digital world.
Well, sure it’s not simple. I didn’t claim that it was, and I’m certainly not the person to fix the problem.
But it is a problem. And operating off the assumption that everybody who wants to be able to reclaim their privacy is automatically a bad guy is not a good assumption to make. That’s the problem I have with how this is being presented. There’s a whole lot of “well, if someone’s on the web about you, you probably deserve it” about this that is cringe-worthy.
In reality, somebody who gets doxxed by Gamergate should be able to say, “No, that’s not okay.” Somebody who gets a lie put up about them should be able to say, “No, not okay.” Somebody who wants their picture removed from a website should be able to do it. Somebody who screwed up at some point in their life deserves to be able to move on.
There are really two questions here, and neither are simple. 1 - Do people have a right to reclaim their privacy from the web? 2 - If so, what’s a good way to do it? My answer to 1 is yes, if they’re not a public figure, and 2, I have no frickin’ clue.
Oh, on the library thing – that’s the problem with the courts’ assumptions on this. This isn’t like having an article in the library – if an article about me is in a library, people really have to work hard to find it. If it’s on the web, it takes seconds to pull up all the dirt in the world on someone, true or not, old or not.
Libel doesn’t infringe on someone’s privacy, because it’s not true. So, yes, it’s unrelated… and there’s already an established body of law that ought to be used to cover it.
…and the person you’re saying that to shouldn’t have any way of saying “sure, once you prove it relates to you” or “no, because it doesn’t infringe on your rights”? The US has already gone through this with the DMCA, and that’s been wide open to abuse - so you want something even easier?
No, I want something that works. What we have now, both on the libel front and the egregious European laws, doesn’t work for either protecting freedom of speech or allowing people to reclaim their privacy.
Another thing: What I admire about Canadian libel law is that absolute truth isn’t the only standard upon which its based. It’s also libelous to tell the truth solely for malicious purposes. The line seems to be drawn between truth, lies, and private and public interests. Nobody needs to know that some guy wet the bed until he was 13 – it may be true, but it also casts him in a poor light, and there’s no public interest served by posting it.
Similarly, there’s no public interest in posting some person’s decade old conviction, if they have no other criminal behavior. It only serves to infringe upon their post-conviction life.
This stuff is vague and nebulous on a lot of levels, I know, but there’s got to be a better way than what’s being done today.
Oh boy! Occams Toilet Brush!
No, I want something that works.
Then change your expectations or change the world. It works everytime that you suffer from wanting the unavailable. What does not work is changing other people.
Privacy is something you have a right to, but it’s not yours for free. Not something you own already. Like breathing, you get to breathe, but nobody will do it for you.
It’s a constant battle, and always will be. The solution you seek for your privacy concerns might well be called ‘‘a cave’’, or perhaps… the 1870’s?
I would submit to you that giving every person a “simple” way without court involvement to censor anything, true or false, that so much as mentions their name or displays their image would most certainly not protect anyone’s freedom of speech, and in the vast majority of cases would not be used to protect what most people would think of as their privacy.
You seem to think that current libel laws don’t go far enough, but I think you’ll have to really work to make your case there. The hypotheticals you’ve given so far haven’t given a lot of support to that assertion.
So you believe there’s a public interest in posting it if there has been further criminal behavior? Interesting.
Are you kidding? I call the library on the phone (4-prong cord, round-dial, goes clickclickclickwhirrrrrrrr) and ask the reference librarian for the article. The reference librarian makes a photocopy (from either paper, microfilm, or microfiche) and keeps it for me to pick up, mails it to me, or faxes it to me.
If it is no longer the 1980s, the librarian uses Google (or LexisNexis if they have the budget).
Regardless, why should level of difficulty have any bearing on the law?
It’s easy for me to climb up to the top of a library shelf; it’s not easy for somebody in a wheelchair to climb to the top of the library shelf.
Should the law treat access to information differently in these scenarios?
How about for somebody that lives in a rural area vs a downtown-metropolis? What about articles written in Spanish when somebody only speaks English, vs articles written in English and an English speaker. Should the information be just as hard to obtain for each? How does the law tackle that?
Is Diana Moon Glampers going to make sure the same level of effort is required to access all information?
The surest way for the world to never find out you sucked at something, or were a total asshole, is to not suck at important things, and don’t be an asshole.
edited for clarity. I am not concerned with the world thinking me an asshole. The pianist is concerned with his image. not me.
I was dancing
With your shadow
Slow down memories hall
I said ‘wait have I been seduced and forgotten’
You said ‘Baby havn’t we all’
Now I don’t like crying
Because it only gets me wet
But I can’t help failing
To remember to forget you
And I know it’s going to be a long time
And I’m crying like a church on Monday
Praying for these feelings to go away
So do me a favor baby
Put down your new god
And love me like Sunday again
The radical solution might be much easier - don’t believe everything you read, and don’t allow yourself to become impotent. In a free speech society, anybody already can and do say anything about everyone. Yet, now as ever, there is no good reason to believe random factoids without evidence. Somebody reading about me at fifteen years old is not evidence of what I was really like and doing. Just like a stranger does not know now if I am trolling or expressing sincere views on anything. Or if I am really “me” or someone else. On the flip side, I think it’s vital to be able to explain who I am and what I do so that I can stand up to the risk of being discredited by vague innuendo. Anybody who would judge me unfavorably without making a proper case is dishonest and/or clueless enough that I shouldn’t be involved with them anyway.
But nearly everyone is now a public figure. What were the old criteria? Somebody hanging around in the public commons or town hall every day? Somebody who you read about in the newspaper? Somebody who published books? Now that most people are mobile text, sound, video creators, editors and/or publishers, it seems like some are tempted to raise the bar in defining what it means to be a public figure. But this involvement is why we’ve made and adopted such technologies, because they do not require one to be a politician or head of industry to put oneself out there.
IMO the risks are the same, except that your average person always framed this as “other people’s problem”.
This is like saying that easily-strippable DRM has no effect because it is easily circumvented. But that’s not actually the stance you take on DRM. And heck, it’s not even an internally consistent approach. If there is no benefit, because it is easily avoided, then how does it impose any of the costs (which are just as easily avoided)?
If they have not had any efficacy, as you suggest, then you have to conclude that corporations are simply wasting tens of millions of dollars per year in sending takedown notices, and hiring people to do so. And that’s assuming they have no effect, which would be difficult to prove.
I suppose the converse is to say that you since the proposed solution doesn’t completely solve the problem it must therefore have no positive effects at all.
DMCA takedowns would also be unconstituional if they were orders. But they’re not orders, they’re safe harbours. Comply with the takedown and you get immunity. A similar regime could be implemented not only for copyright violations but libel: you are not required to remove the allegedly offending content, but you allow it to remain at your peril.
Level of difficulty and ease of access have an effect on the law now. It’s a partial basis of the statute of limitations on libel, along with the concept of “stale” information, which is no longer a relevant measure. People judge information by the place in which it appears in Google, as opposed to its age or difficulty in accessing it.
Such a regime could be implemented for libel, but why should it? Libel isn’t that widespread a problem, it would be FAR more difficult to monitor for than copyright violations are, and once you’re made aware of it you already “allow it to remain at your peril”. On the flip side, the existing libel laws already get frequent use by people attempting to silence perfectly legitimate/legal criticism and debate. What possible upside would there be to pushing all the power into the hands of the person making a claim of wrongdoing?
You cannot un-ring a bell. You cannot get privacy back once it is lost. Can you make people unknow a secret? Can you make people unsee an image? With the way data on the internet works, whack-a-mole is never successful and has the opposite of the intended effect. There is even a term for it, the streisand effect. This pianist who none of us know or would otherwise care about has brought a much greater level of attention to his negative reviews then the sum total of attention the received before.
Similar to other things that cannot be undone, you cannot unmurder someone even though they have the right to live, the only way one could address these issues is by criminalizing the initial problematic action as a deterrent, but those types of laws are equally tricky and we have to be careful we don’t create a bigger problem then we are solving.
I was addressing Cory’s technical/legal objections more than anything else, but under the current legal regime ISPs do not face any liability for hosting libelous content. While you may believe this is as it should be, transitioning to an alternative liability-plus-safe-harbour regime would incentivize removal of possibly libelous statements.
Democratizing the process? Anyone can file a formulaic DMCA takedown notice. Not everyone can launch copyright-infringement legal action. Presumably the same is true of libel actions.
And that right there is the issue. Why would we want to make it so a provider who is unrelated to an issue and probably knows absolutely nothing about the people involved has an enhanced interest in removing something that has not in any way been determined to be libel?
Well, yes. And even though it’s usually really easy for a person to make sure they actually own a piece of media they have created before demanding that someone else’s display be taken down, they still get misused a lot.
It’s not always easy for a person to know whether a thing said about them is actually libel, and people usually have a really strong interest in claiming as much to be libel as they can. Exhibit A, on this article, a performer who is saying that an opinionated review is not “the truth”.
You’re suggesting to make it easy for people (or corporations) to silence speech they don’t like, without having to go through the steps of actually arguing that A) it’s false and B) that it actually causes them harm. You really see that as a benefit?
