An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee – a key step in its journey to becoming law. This follows a series of changes and compromises that appear to address critics' greatest concerns while introducing fresh problems.
The draft legislation [PDF] is nominally supposed to help rid the web of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by altering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which strongly shields websites and apps, like Facebook and Twitter, from liability regardless of whatever their users share on those platforms, plus or minus some caveats. The proposed law rather ignored the fact that Section 230 already doesn't protect internet giants if their netizens upload illegal content, though.
Initial drafts of the law also contained two proposals that raised serious concerns from a broad range of groups and organizations. Firstly, the creation of a new 19-person committee that would be led by the Attorney General and dominated by law enforcement which would create content rules that tech companies would have to follow to retain legal protections. Secondly, and the suggestion that has security folks up in arms, is that those rules could require tech companies to provide Feds-only access to encrypted communications.
The idea is that companies would have to "earn" their legal shield – hence the name of the bill, EARN IT – by following the best practices created by the committee.
Following significant pushback on those points, the Judiciary Committee made changes aimed at gaining the full approval of all its members. In the now-OK'd version of the bill, the commission, called the National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, would still create its rules but it would be "voluntary" for online platforms to follow them. Instead, if tech companies did follow the commission's rules, it "would be a defense in any civil suit," said committee chair Lindsay Graham (R-SC).
Concerns over the law being used to force tech companies to introduce encryption backdoors led to an amendment [PDF], put forward by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), that stated online platforms won't face civil or criminal liability if they are unable to break end-to-end encryption in their own services.
Taken together, the amendments are intended to attract wide congressional support for the bill, and pave the way to open up Section 230. And in this instance, it worked, with the committee green-lighting the revised version by 22-0 votes on Thursday, allowing it to progress a little further toward the statute books.
However, privacy advocates and tech titans, as well as some lawmakers, remain strongly opposed to the law. For one, the proposed commission will not be made up of elected officials, and will still be able to create rules that do not need congressional approval, putting an extraordinary amount of censorship power into the hands of very few people with limited accountability.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:27AM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:38PM
""IF". You have this implicit assumption that every good can be made plentiful"
No one said that every good can be made plentiful or that money doesn't apply to scarce goods. I'm not sure what the point of your post is other than to look foolish by making obvious straw man arguments. Are you trolling? Because you certainly aren't making those that support your position look good.
One of the things that's taught in economic theory is that it applies to scarce goods. It doesn't apply the same to those goods that are infinite. So for scarce goods money makes sense. For infinite goods the theory is different.
Not to say that IP shouldn't exist but the purpose should be to serve a public interest. To increase aggregate output and to expand the public domain so that we can have more. Things should enter the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.
I feel like the pro-IP firms are re-hiring the idiots again. They kicked out the educated people, they cost too much money, and reinstated the minimum wage workers to argue their case.
and yes, pro IP firms do post on message boards. Their IP addresses have been identified on Techdirt in the past. It's not a crazy conspiracy theory.