[jvdh]

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).

[jacquesm]

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.

[Confusion]

A real name has to go, but there is no requirement to remove a nickname or an account.

[authentic]

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.

[Confusion]

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.

[authentic]

a user agreement cannot override statutory rights.

[Confusion]

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.

[authentic]

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/

[jrockway]

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.)

[stingraycharles]

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 ?

[authentic]

technically, YC has a European subsidiary (a startup funded by them).

[jacquesm]

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.

[authentic]

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.

[jacquesm]

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.

[authentic]

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.

[jrockway]

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.)

[jacquesm]

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.