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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: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday November 20, @10:35AM (4 children)
Unfortunately, I do not see this changing until the US has far more restrictive data privacy laws with real penalties for non-compliance. I do not see this happening in the near future and not under the next administration. But administrations aside, I imagine it will also be objected to under the 2nd Amendment as any restriction will be claimed to be impeding business' right to free speech.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 20, @02:20PM (2 children)
IIUC, a business does not have the right of free speech. Just the people. Of course, a corporation is a "legal person", but that's only suppose to be true in a limited sense. (E.g. corporations aren't tried for negligent homicide, though occasionally people who work for them are.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday November 20, @03:50PM
I forgot the /s - my apologies.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday November 20, @06:27PM
Well, according to the Supreme Court, corporations have a right to free speech, at least when it is expressed as contributions to political candidates and parties.
See Citizens United v. FEC [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Spamalope on Wednesday November 20, @08:02PM
So long as a 'national security letter' is a get out of constitutional violation under color of law jail free card, barring even discussion of the 1A violation that's not changing. You can go to jail for documenting their breaking the top law of the land, based on a rules they made up to prevent 'interference'.