[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.

[jacquesm]

> 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.

[authentic]

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.

[jrockway]

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.

[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.