The (old) Licquia Family Blog
This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.
Here's the current site.
This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.
Here's the current site.
From Slashdot comes this story about Europe's soon-to-be-passed law.
Evidently, in Europe they have a concept called a "right of reply". If a media organization publishes something about you in print, radio, or television, you have a right to force them to publish your reply. The new law extends this right to online publications, from the Web sites of media outlets to the lady weblogging about her neighbors.
The law as applied to large media organizations bothers me a little bit, but my worries are tempered by a recognition of the advantages of traditional media over the people they comment on. But the new law makes no sense.
The Internet is not the same as traditional media. It has advantages and disadvantages. One of the traditional disadvantages (which traditional media likes to make hay about whenever it can) is the credibility gap: if every nut can post to Usenet or write a blog, then we have to be careful about believing what's written on the Web. So, online libel is nothing like print libel, unless you consider a kid with a copier and a hand-lettered "the principal is a cow" leaflet "libel".
There's also not nearly the need for "right of reply" when one can reply as easily as one can on the Web. Online comments, TrackBack, search, and Web sites like Technorati show how easy it is to link a reply to an original comment without the active assistance of the original site. Would having a working comments section suffice for this law's right of reply? What about TrackBack? What about a link to a Technorati query? A Google search? I doubt that the Council has given any of these questions the thought they deserve.
What's more, as the original article mentions, the law means that the creator of the forum is no longer its master. This has many implications. It's a fairly regular thing to see forum owners crack down on trolls to protect forums from degrading into name-calling exercises; what will happen when the trolls use the force of law against the forum owner? Does the right of reply apply to anyone criticized in a right-of-reply post?
Here's a particularly juicy gem: "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours." Since replies are, by definition, younger than the posts they reply to, and since blogs are "made publicly available" on a continuous and ongoing basis, does this make it nearly impossible to shut down a blog with right-of-reply posts? To my reading, you'd have to delete all of the replied-to posts first, and then continue to maintain the blog for enough time to ensure that the replies were available for as long as the original was. Such a legally mandated burden obviously increases the cost of running a blog, and a few high-profile cases of this happening could discourage people from expressing themselves.
For these and other reasons, I believe that this law will stifle, rather than encourage, free speech. Furthermore, I predict that someone will try to use this law to shut down a blog or render it unusable, in a similar manner to the Church of Scientology's ongoing crusade to shut down an online newsgroup. If Europe won't abandon this terrible idea, they should at least scrap this law and write one that takes into account the unique nature of the Internet, instead of trying to force the Internet to act like it has the limitations of paper and ink or radio spectrum.
Fortunately for me, I live in a country with guaranteed rights of free speech and freedom of association, so, as the article above points out, it's very unlikely that such a law will ever affect me. (Unless I decide to vacation in Europe again; despite the pleasant trip I had last time, it's looking less and less likely that I will, given Europe's gradual descent into European Community madness.)
Jun 16, 2003 | Comments are no longer available