The important part, in my eyes, is in my last response to dragonwriter, which I will repeat here.
>You just no longer have to worry about the website who you've sued successfully in your local courts taking its offense at having being found liable to the ECHR. So it has precisely zero effect on Britain beyond not blocking certain types of liability that the British government might create through its own laws.
As explained near the end of the article:
>As a consequence, active intermediaries and blog operators will have considerable incentives to discontinue offering a comments feature, and the fear of liability may lead to additional self-censorship by operators. This is an invitation to self-censorship at its worst.
The statues under the United Kingdom Hate Speech laws means people can sue in courts for comments containing hate speech and the ECHR now has a precedent to rule in their favor and hold the intermediate party liable for said comments. The result? Nobody wants to be held liable, so they shut down their comment sections.
That's bad for free speech and is a side-entry form of censorship. Not direct from the state, but implied and enforced by the state on private entities.
//end self quote
Although the courts probably wouldn't hear it - wouldn't ISIS or criticisms of extremist readings/interpretations of the Qur'an be protected from hate speech under the U.K's current statutes? Just want to make sure I'm understanding the U.K's hate speech laws properly.
I went to an interesting seminar on UK defamation law as it relates to the UK, given by an experienced barrister. He didn't mention much about hate speech, so I don't know if it's relevant. Notes and slides from the seminar are here: http://francisdavey.github.io/defamation/ and I highly recommend reading them, very interesting! It basically looks like a UK operator now has a fair amount of protection if they take reasonable actions.
Under slide 21 - it seems (unless I am misreading) "honest opinion" is defensible.
So if I call someone a shithead and hold that as my true opinion, it is defensible. But if I call someone a shithead as a matter-of-fact, it isn't. (replace shithead with most any slander: racist, pedophile, sexist)
Slide 32 made me laugh.
Slide 35 seems unreasonable. What if I went on vacation for a week? I only have 48 hours to operate in? So to legally cover my ass, I would have to hire someone to moderate the comment section of my blog while I went on a honeymoon? While this may be an excuse accepted by the court outside the letter-of-the-law (humans are a bit more... human in application of the law), the letter-of-the-law would hold me liable.
There seems to be a loophole that isn't given thought. What if the original comment presupposes the removal and affirms that - "in such a case that a claim is made to remove this comment, my response is that this comment must be retained." and gives their name and address?
Furthermore - wouldn't that put the commentator in potential harm/danger of their life (in an extreme scenario)? That hardly seems reasonable and only encourages them to not respond and have the comment removed. Which is harmful for free speech.
Thanks for the slides. Informative although still a bit scary.
The notes are a bit more detailed (p13 for Section 5). There seem to be lots of different overlapping defences of which you can choose to use one or more, that one is more protocol based and involved than the others (though some companies will like having a protocol to follow). It seems that the commentator doesn't have to consent to their contact information being released in order to keep their comment up.
I remember the guy saying that the best defence seems to be the EU "Information Society Service", and that's what will apply to most startups/businesses.
IANAL, but to be devil's advocate, it is slightly irresponsible to allow potentially malicious posters to post things on your website with no supervision, even if you are on holiday.
>It seems that the commentator doesn't have to consent to their contact information being released in order to keep their comment up.
So would my presumption clause work for keeping a comment up? I couldn't find anything on that approach.
>IANAL, but to be devil's advocate, it is slightly irresponsible to allow potentially malicious posters to post things on your website with no supervision, even if you are on holiday.
They do seem to take "ability to moderate" into consideration from a few case examples.
I honestly don't have a legal defense for this - I just see it as unreasonable. Which wouldn't hold up very well in court. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727988
The important part, in my eyes, is in my last response to dragonwriter, which I will repeat here.
>You just no longer have to worry about the website who you've sued successfully in your local courts taking its offense at having being found liable to the ECHR. So it has precisely zero effect on Britain beyond not blocking certain types of liability that the British government might create through its own laws.
As explained near the end of the article:
>As a consequence, active intermediaries and blog operators will have considerable incentives to discontinue offering a comments feature, and the fear of liability may lead to additional self-censorship by operators. This is an invitation to self-censorship at its worst.
The statues under the United Kingdom Hate Speech laws means people can sue in courts for comments containing hate speech and the ECHR now has a precedent to rule in their favor and hold the intermediate party liable for said comments. The result? Nobody wants to be held liable, so they shut down their comment sections.
That's bad for free speech and is a side-entry form of censorship. Not direct from the state, but implied and enforced by the state on private entities.
//end self quote
Although the courts probably wouldn't hear it - wouldn't ISIS or criticisms of extremist readings/interpretations of the Qur'an be protected from hate speech under the U.K's current statutes? Just want to make sure I'm understanding the U.K's hate speech laws properly.