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by lgleason
2795 days ago
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For all of the people saying that Joyent can do this because they are a private company that statement there is a catch to this. All service providers are exempt from being sued for content on their platform under safe harbor under the argument that they were neutral platforms. If they are going to start to curate content by kicking companies like Gab.com off then it is time that a few copyright, libel test cases against these companies make their way to the courts given that it is in violation of the spirit behind safe harbor as it is stated in section 230 of the communications decency act.. It also is going beyond the "good Samaritan" definition. |
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The term "safe harbor" is typically used to refer to the provisions of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), not the Communications Decency Act you're discussing. OCILLA protects hosting and network providers from liability for copyright infringements committed by their customers, so long as they aren't aware of the infringement and don't directly benefit from it, and so long as they comply with the DMCA takedown process. This is, obviously, completely irrelevant to this situation.
The CDA actually does the exact opposite of what you are claiming here. It explicitly indemnifies service providers for blocking content, regardless of whether that content is constitutionally protected or not -- it reads in part:
> (2) Civil liability: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected […]