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Jawboning In Plain Sight: The Unconstitutional Censorship Tolerated By The DMCA
For better or worse, jawboning has been a hot topic recently, and it's unlikely that interest will fade any time soon. Jawboning, in broad strokes, is when the government pressures a third party to make that third party chill the speech of another instead of going after the speech directly. Because the First Amendment says that the government cannot go after speech directly, this approach can at first seem to be the "one easy trick" for the government to try to affect the speech it wants to affect so that it could get away with it constitutionally. But as the Supreme Court reminded earlier this year in NRA v. Vullo, it's not actually constitutional to try this sort of end-run around the First Amendment.
[....] there should be concern about Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and how it operates to force intermediaries to act against users and their speech, whether they would want to or not, and whether the targeted speech is wrongful or not.
[....] "Why now?" After all, the DMCA has been working its unconstitutional way for a quarter of a century, and we've been tolerating it. But tolerating the intolerable does not make it tolerable.
Yep! Just pretend it's a copyright issue and fraudulently file a DMCA, under plenty of perjury, to silence what you don't like.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20, @06:31AM (8 children)
How much do ya wanna bet that was an "honest oversight" on the part of the legislature.....
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday November 20, @04:30PM (7 children)
Legislature and honest do not belong together in any one sentence, except for this one, therefore falsifying the first assertion of this sentence.
Some people need assistants to hire some assistance.
Other people need assistance to hire some assistants.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20, @05:50PM (6 children)
Your legislature is a direct reflection of the voters that reelect them, so maybe you should redirect your accusation about "honesty"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Spamalope on Wednesday November 20, @08:00PM (5 children)
Which rare exceptions, the peerage selects who may appear on the primary ballots. Voters can pick their favorite lizard, but it's gonna be a lizard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20, @10:15PM (4 children)
That only happens due to voter apathy. They can petition outside the party system entirely, but they have to learn how to cooperate and do it themselves. It is their own dysfunction that the government reflects right now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheReaperD on Thursday November 21, @11:16AM (3 children)
When the system is rigged, can you blame people for not wanting to participate? When you know that, no matter who you choose, they don't have your best interests in mind, you really don't care who wins. It's how Trump, a convicted criminal, bigot, misogynist, racist, anti-democratic serial liar, and wannabe mobster, won the 2024 election. We've gotten to the point where even lies about 'change' and 'draining the swamp' are more hope than the alternative, even when he promises to end elections! That's how disgruntled the average voter is. Yet, even with this obvious referendum, the Democrats blame 'woke' culture (the Republican mantra), rather than acknowledge that it's their sucking up to the banking and billionaire class that's the problem. When you have to go to banks and CEOs for handouts to get elected, there's no way that workers' rights can ever be on their agenda, beyond lip service.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @12:39AM (2 children)
You can't know if a system is rigged until enough people make the effort to vote out the incumbents. It is we, that allow our own herding and tribal instincts to be exploited by carnival barkers, that "rig" the system.
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Friday November 22, @10:02AM (1 child)
The problem is: The oligarchy chooses the two people you get to select from. This was proven beyond a reasonable doubt when Bernie Sanders, a true populist, was kicked out of the race by the DNC in 2020 by forcing all the other candidates to drop out and endorsing Biden. When they were taken to court over the action, their defense was that it was their *right* to rig the primary. The courts agreed with them! Sure, it's *theoretically* possible to get 50.1% of the voting public to write in an alternate candidate, but getting 75+ million people to take any collective action not presented before them is a pipe dream, at best, delusional, at worst.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @07:24PM
Well, there you go. How is that the party's fault? They are merely exploiting our own weaknesses. Are we just going to let them? It seems the choice is still ours, not theirs.