Free Information

Once again, a senseless terror attack.
Once again, politicians are telling us that we must stand up for a free and open society.
Of course we must. But do they?
Western democracy is slowly being hollowed out. It’s getting ever more secretive and less transparent. Power is being centralized and is moving further away from the people. It is getting ever more difficult to participate in and to scrutinize the decision-making process. Free citizens are being reduced to subordinates.

Germany has approved a draft law that will enable businesses to run open WiFi hotspots without being held liable for the copyright infringements of their customers. Copyright holders will still have the ability to request that certain sites are blocked to prevent repeat infringement.

Torrentfreak: Germany Approves Draft Law to Protect WiFi Operators From Piracy Liability »

Bloomberg » Google Brings Fake News Fact-Checking to Search Results: Search giant is letting partners and publishers decide what’s true, what’s false and what’s in between »

Minister Maas has proposed the law which places a variety of obligations on the companies, in the apparent hope that this will lead profit-motivated companies to take over private censorship measures. Following years of deletions of perfectly legal content by, for example, Facebook, Minister Maas seems to believe that this will lead to outcomes that are appropriate in a democratic society based on the rule of law. (…)

A database set up jointly by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube aims to identify “terrorist and radicalising” content automatically and to remove it from these platforms. (…)
It appears that no research whatsoever has been done on the likely impact of this initiative, including no review mechanisms on its impact and no way of establishing whether the initiative has counter-productive effects. (…)
The role of judicial and law enforcement authorities in this process has, unsurprisingly, not been mentioned.

In Switzerland, the first trial based on likes on Facebook is currently underway. According to The Local, a 45-year-old from Zurich has been charged with defamation for liking Facebook posts that accused the plaintiff of being anti-Semitic. So basically, a man is being prosecuted for liking something somebody else posted.

On the better web Berners-Lee envisions, users control where their data is stored and how it’s accessed. For example, social networks would still run in the cloud. But you could store your data locally. Alternately, you could choose a different cloud server run by a company or community you trust. You might have different servers for different types of information—for health and fitness data, says—that is completely separate from the one you use for financial records.

A Spanish court on Wednesday sentenced a young woman to jail for posting jokes on Twitter about the 1973 assassination of a senior figure in the Franco dictatorship.
Even the granddaughter of Carrero Blanco attacked the move by public prosecutors to charge Vera and put her on trial, saying in a letter sent to daily El Pais in January that while the jokes were in poor taste they were not worthy of such legal action. “I’m scared of a society in which freedom of expression, however regrettable it may be, can lead to jail sentences,” Lucia Carrero Blanco wrote.

From a proposed Californian law:

18320.5. It is unlawful for a person to knowingly and willingly make, publish or circulate on an Internet Web site, or cause to be made, published, or circulated in any writing posted on an Internet Web site, a false or deceptive statement designed to influence the vote on either of the following:
(a) Any issue submitted to voters at an election.
(b) Any candidate for election to public office.

EFF comments…

Under the extreme rules proposed by the Commission in the Copyright Directive, uploads to the internet would need to be scanned to assess if any photo, video or text that is being uploaded can be “identified” based on information provided by copyright holders. This would block, for example, memes that include copyrighted images or videos, parody, quotation and other perfectly harmless activities.