Sarah Jeong, the writer who moved from The Verge to the New
York Times amidst controversy over some of her old “tweet-backs” that some
viewed as racist (they weren’t), has an out-of-print book called “The Internet
of Garbage” (2015), now only on Kindle for $.99. But The Verge is republishing it online on
its site. Here is the link to the first
section:
Jeong discusses a case where an actress, Cindy Lee Garcia,
in case Garcia v. Google, litigated to have segments of “The Innocence of
Muslims” taken down when her voice-over was used without her permission in a
manner that apparently insults Islam, and resulted in her getting constant
threats. She tried to claim copyright on her own voice-over and get the material
taken down by DMCA Safe Harbor. YouTube insisted this was not copyright. A long legal battle in the appeals courts
follows.
The piece then explains the difference between Section 230
and DMCA Safe Harbor. The former has to
do with the usual torts, like defamation and invasion of privacy. The latter is about copyright.
The article also explains the basic reason why it is so hard
to control online harassment. Platforms
by and large are immune from most liability under Section 230, because they
cannot possibly pre-screen everything.
On copyright (which was the biggest concern in the earliest days of the
WWW), YouTube has come a long way with ContentID in identifying most infringement
before the fact, but there are false positives.
(You could be flagged for your own music, and there are silly flags for
outdoor background music obviously PD.) But
harassment is much harder to police and hate speech is so subjective that a lot
of it is hard to define outside of specific intersectionalities.
Likewise, as we saw yesterday, it would be very difficult to
require platforms to be responsible for publication of weapons assembly (Cody
Wilson, the injunction yesterday regarding 3D printers) although YouTube and
Facebook have already become proactive on this.
The article doesn’t mention how the FOSTA (Backpage-driven
sex trafficking law) legislation passed this spring complicates Section 230.
No comments:
Post a Comment