A German court has offered the weirdly cretinous opinion that if one cannot moderate one’s chatroom forums then the only sensible option is to shut them down or, somehow (not yet technically reasonably possible), to reduce the flow of web traffic so that one can cope.
Geeklawyer is somewhat well disposed to the Germans. Yea, they have committed minor indiscretions in the past, like murdering 6 million jews etc. but, shit, who hasn’t indulged in genocide once in a while?
Nonetheless the idea that the core value of the Intarweb; immediacy intimacy and, yes, a degree of anarchy, should be curtailed so as to allow control, planning & restraint really leaves one with the thought “do they understand the whole of this Internet thingy?”. Geeklawyer says no, & why does the German judiciary make such consistently poor decisions.
I swear the English courts made a vaguely similiar ruling a couple of years back (that ISPs are responsible for what gets posted on their chatrooms/forums) - mind you, I am dragging this up from the dregs of my defamation lectures, so I could be wrong.
You may be thinking of Godfrey v Demon. However the essential point here is that, unlike Godfrey, they are saying that if you lack the resource to adequately monitor a blog/website you shouldn’t run one at all. I think that is absurd.
I do agree that there should be liability in reasonable circumstances but a light touch, in the Anglo Saxon tradition, should be applied not the officious and rigid administrative controls that our continental cousins seem to relish in all things.
Hmm. It seems criticising the fuhrer and his cronies is to be outlawed once again. You’d have thought they learned from last time. …er and the time before that as well for that matter.
“Ver are your server logs?”