I don't know about the US, but over here in the Netherlands any service must respond to a request to remove your records. They must comply, or provide a very good reason why your comments/submissions must remain.
(In discussions comments can stay if required for the discussion to make sense, but the name has to go).
regulation outside the US may not apply here but this is not how the law works in the EU, which deals with the data itself rather than just identification.
not too long ago I compelled a telco who had pissed me off to send me a 200 page dump of all the data they had about me and subsequently delete all of it, using the legal system after they had initially refused.
Not on online forums where you need to agree with a halfway decent User Agreement before you can open an account. You grant the forum copyright on your posts. There is, for instance, no way to get your posts removed from Anandtech's forum, if they don't want to. You get them anonimized at best.
Of course it can. Contracts and other agreements limit your rights in some way. That's the whole point of signing an an agreement: mutually agreeing to something that isn't guaranteed by any other existing law.
I have some idea of what I am talking about, because I do work for a large online forum, where the legal department has made it very clear that we do not need to honour requests by users to have their accounts deleted. We keep the right to display their contributions, because they have granted the forum copyright on those contributions. Not an exclusive copyright, mind you. We only have to anonimize their accounts and contents.
There is an inverse to the disease described in that article: the idea that someone with a lack of expert knowledge cannot possible say things that are correct, just because you disagree with him.
The following:
[something] cannot override statutory rights.
is a blanket statement, to which anyone can find counterexamples. You're just not trying, because you are too focussed on your original point.
In general, I know jack about the practice of law and I know it. However I know about this specific instance, because lawyers told me how it works, and I actually do know a bit about theory of law. I'm trying to explain to you how this specific practical fact of law could come about, based on theory of law. Specifically, the fact that laws fall short, for instance because of ambiguity and because of conflicts with other laws. Even the basest constitutional rights give rise to such conflicts, which is why judges are needed to interpret laws. Quite a few laws are around, specifically to stop gaps in other laws. Example: the first sale doctrine.
As an example of an obvious shortcoming: you are allowed to go wherever you want in a public place. The law specifies no limitation on that. However, there certainly is one very certain limitation: you cannot occupy the exact same space someone else is already occupying and you cannot get him to move by claiming your constitutional right to occupy that bit of space. It would be silly to actually codify such limitations in the laws, because their number cannot be exhausted. However, it is a very clear limitation on one of your fundamental rights. This is not my intelligence speaking: this is my knowledge of fundamental problems in philosophical theories of law and their very practical implications.
HN is not in the Netherlands, so this is completely irrelevant. (Just like when some company in the US sends a DMCA takedown notice to the Netherlands.)
He wasn't implying that Dutch law was valid in the US, he was simply stating that because perhaps there is some similar law in the US (hence the "I don't know about the US").
Besides, does one really need to provide a valid reason to delete an account ? Isn't "just because" good enough ?
And even if, a subsidiary incorporated independently is not going to be liable for acts of the parent company unless they are actively engaged in the same activity.
And in this case they would not be, Ycombinator owns and runs the forum, that startup does its own thing.
you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).
on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.
Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.
For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway),
Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but
> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).
Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.
> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.
Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.
> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
I disagree with you.
A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.
Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.
If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.
Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.
If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.
Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.
news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.
Do not make deletions out to be more work than they really are, as others have mentioned the suppression of content from a particular account is already implemented to combat spam. Anyway, deletion of particular message is technically the same as allowing edits after 1hr with a fixed replacement text (such as "[deleted by user]").
User-triggered account "deletion" would be a trivial addition instantly obviating recurring, tedious discussions like this. Even Google lets you retract your submissions from their usenet archives and Groups in a simple way.
There are many valid reasons why a user may wish to have their messages removed that override the interest of forum integrity.
No right lapses after one hour since there is no permanent license grant for user submitted content to HN in the first place (lack of TOS). The copyright of entries remains with the user.
You will be able to serve but the court does not have standing, in spite of what the BUMA did with the pirate bay guys, which was a travesty of justice if there ever was one.
Unfortunately they didn't have the best of lawyers from what I've seen.
Suit has to be brought in the local court of the defendant, that's a pretty strong rule there and the lawyer seems to have failed to capitalize on that, instead concentrating on whether the serving was done properly.
By doing that he shifted the argument from one of 'standing' to one on whether they had had proper notice, implicitly acknowledging standing.
Comments
I don't know about the US, but over here in the Netherlands any service must respond to a request to remove your records. They must comply, or provide a very good reason why your comments/submissions must remain. (In discussions comments can stay if required for the discussion to make sense, but the name has to go).
His name isn't there, it's just a non-specific alias.
I read it to mean 'dave australia', if he is actually called 'dave au' then that's slightly different.
A real name has to go, but there is no requirement to remove a nickname or an account.
regulation outside the US may not apply here but this is not how the law works in the EU, which deals with the data itself rather than just identification.
not too long ago I compelled a telco who had pissed me off to send me a 200 page dump of all the data they had about me and subsequently delete all of it, using the legal system after they had initially refused.
Not on online forums where you need to agree with a halfway decent User Agreement before you can open an account. You grant the forum copyright on your posts. There is, for instance, no way to get your posts removed from Anandtech's forum, if they don't want to. You get them anonimized at best.
a user agreement cannot override statutory rights.
Of course it can. Contracts and other agreements limit your rights in some way. That's the whole point of signing an an agreement: mutually agreeing to something that isn't guaranteed by any other existing law.
There are many rights that can in fact not be signed away.
You have no idea what you are talking about, do you? http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/
I have some idea of what I am talking about, because I do work for a large online forum, where the legal department has made it very clear that we do not need to honour requests by users to have their accounts deleted. We keep the right to display their contributions, because they have granted the forum copyright on those contributions. Not an exclusive copyright, mind you. We only have to anonimize their accounts and contents.
There is an inverse to the disease described in that article: the idea that someone with a lack of expert knowledge cannot possible say things that are correct, just because you disagree with him.
The following:
[something] cannot override statutory rights.
is a blanket statement, to which anyone can find counterexamples. You're just not trying, because you are too focussed on your original point.
In general, I know jack about the practice of law and I know it. However I know about this specific instance, because lawyers told me how it works, and I actually do know a bit about theory of law. I'm trying to explain to you how this specific practical fact of law could come about, based on theory of law. Specifically, the fact that laws fall short, for instance because of ambiguity and because of conflicts with other laws. Even the basest constitutional rights give rise to such conflicts, which is why judges are needed to interpret laws. Quite a few laws are around, specifically to stop gaps in other laws. Example: the first sale doctrine.
As an example of an obvious shortcoming: you are allowed to go wherever you want in a public place. The law specifies no limitation on that. However, there certainly is one very certain limitation: you cannot occupy the exact same space someone else is already occupying and you cannot get him to move by claiming your constitutional right to occupy that bit of space. It would be silly to actually codify such limitations in the laws, because their number cannot be exhausted. However, it is a very clear limitation on one of your fundamental rights. This is not my intelligence speaking: this is my knowledge of fundamental problems in philosophical theories of law and their very practical implications.
HN is not in the Netherlands, so this is completely irrelevant. (Just like when some company in the US sends a DMCA takedown notice to the Netherlands.)
He wasn't implying that Dutch law was valid in the US, he was simply stating that because perhaps there is some similar law in the US (hence the "I don't know about the US").
Besides, does one really need to provide a valid reason to delete an account ? Isn't "just because" good enough ?
technically, YC has a European subsidiary (a startup funded by them).
So ?
Europe != NL.
And even if, a subsidiary incorporated independently is not going to be liable for acts of the parent company unless they are actively engaged in the same activity.
And in this case they would not be, Ycombinator owns and runs the forum, that startup does its own thing.
you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).
on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.
No, you misunderstood the law.
A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary.
Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.
Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.
For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway),
Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but
> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).
Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.
> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.
Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.
> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
I disagree with you.
A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.
Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.
If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.
Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.
If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.
Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.
news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.
I have not changed my stance on anything.
Do not make deletions out to be more work than they really are, as others have mentioned the suppression of content from a particular account is already implemented to combat spam. Anyway, deletion of particular message is technically the same as allowing edits after 1hr with a fixed replacement text (such as "[deleted by user]").
User-triggered account "deletion" would be a trivial addition instantly obviating recurring, tedious discussions like this. Even Google lets you retract your submissions from their usenet archives and Groups in a simple way.
There are many valid reasons why a user may wish to have their messages removed that override the interest of forum integrity.
No right lapses after one hour since there is no permanent license grant for user submitted content to HN in the first place (lack of TOS). The copyright of entries remains with the user.
Spam is not eliminated by deletion, it's eliminated by killing. If you set showdead=1 in your preferences, you can see the spam. It's annoying.
Consider this. You serve YC with papers in Europe. They don't show up to the trial. Now what?
(Hint: the US is not going to extradite pg for not deleting your HN account.)
You will be able to serve but the court does not have standing, in spite of what the BUMA did with the pirate bay guys, which was a travesty of justice if there ever was one.
Unfortunately they didn't have the best of lawyers from what I've seen.
Suit has to be brought in the local court of the defendant, that's a pretty strong rule there and the lawyer seems to have failed to capitalize on that, instead concentrating on whether the serving was done properly.
By doing that he shifted the argument from one of 'standing' to one on whether they had had proper notice, implicitly acknowledging standing.