Comment by AnthonyMouse
8 months ago
Why should we not want this when the law is bad? The government should face pushback from all sides when attempting something odious.
8 months ago
Why should we not want this when the law is bad? The government should face pushback from all sides when attempting something odious.
It's a democratic country. The voters decide if the laws their government passes are bad or not.
There is actually no evidence this is the case, and there is evidence it is the opposite - that the less voters support something, the more likely it is to pass.
This claim appears blatantly false.
If being unpopular makes a law more likely to pass, then surely the French government tars and feathers all French children every other week.
No, they don't, since the voters would prevent that by voting for a different government.
7 replies →
By what means? Picking one of various parties that all colluded on the laws? Perhaps one that promises to oppose it but then does the opposite? Let's not pretend that voting of all things is an effective means to enact change on specific issues in a representative democracy.
One answers is that this case isn't actually a bad law. This appears to be blatant organized piracy. What's odious about copyright laws? This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process. It's not like somebody submitting automated DMCA requests on videos with silent audio tracks or something. It's a court order for these specific domains, which would have been carefully curated and has been quite literally litigated.
The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs. Countries have sovereignty. If a company doesn't want to obey those laws, they should not operate in that country. If the law really were bad, the way you'd actually fix this is by the democratic process. That's up to the voters, not foreign corporations.
> One answers is that this case isn't actually a bad law.
It's censoring DNS. That's a bad precedent. The technical capacity to do it shouldn't exist because otherwise it will be used for every other form of censorship, and deprive democratic countries of any moral or technical authority to object when authoritarian countries want to do it.
It will also be ineffective, leading for calls to make it effective, but the only way to do that is totalitarianism. There is no good that comes from setting out on that road.
> The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs.
Ignoring the law doesn't get them out of paying the penalty, but penalties are meant to be sane, not some Hollywood accounting nonsense where one person watching one illicit stream of a sporting event causes the event organizers six billion dollars in damages. Then if Cloudflare wants to say "yeah, we're not doing that" and just pay the $100,000 dollar fine, it's clear that they're standing on principle -- they're paying $100,000 in exchange for ostensibly nothing -- and there is nothing wrong with that. The purpose of the penalty is to deter the underlying wrongdoing, not to deter civil disobedience. Anyone should be able to say "I am going to suffer the consequences of this because my principles are worth more than the fine" without having some authoritarians ratchet up the penalty to infinity.
> Countries have sovereignty.
Democratic countries have checks and balances. One of the checks and balances is that if you pass a law people don't respect, they don't respect it. Then you have to choose between punishing not the evildoers, but the principled idealists -- or repealing the law.
> It's censoring DNS. That's a bad precedent
France uses a sane legal system based on civil law, so precedents rarely matter. In this case the Sports Code says that piracy is bad and operators can be requested to block piracy websites if they're used and "harm" rights holders. That doesn't mean that tomorrow in a random case not related to sports piracy a judge can refer to that law and order censoring of other DNS entries.
1 reply →
> This appears to be blatant organized piracy.
What does online streaming have to do with unsanctioned boating activities.
> What's odious about copyright laws?
Their violation of our rights to freely share and improve on our culture.
> This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process.
This doesn't mean the court's decision is any more defensible.