Yes, because in Europe free speech isn't an absolute right; sometimes the right of privacy trumps free speech.
How long before this moves into "right to not be offended trumps free speech" territory?
You can comment all you want about it, but it doesn't compel them to change how they are at all.
Interestingly though, your comment is a nice example of being irrationally fearful of free political speech.
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. First it's okay to comment on other culture's behaviors and now it's "cultural imperialism".
How about everyone is okay to comment on whatever they wish without the meta value judgements? I think that system works pretty well.
Sometimes those people will mix up "first ammendment" rights with what a website owner is allowed to do; or they appear to be unaware of the very many cases of people in America who lose their jobs or are arrested because they wear the wrong t-shirt or have an innocent poster on their door.
We often hear these people when there's coverage of twitter trolls going to court. They'll say that it's ridiculous to prosecute people for being mean on twitter. This is intensely frustrating because -and this should be fucking obvious- no-one is arrested for being a bit mean on social media. People are arrested for making credible repeated threats of violence. But that happens in the US.
Arrested and convicted of a crime are two different things. Do you have any evidence of that happening? I know of a Virginia teenager who was arrested last year because he wouldn't take off an NRA shirt, but first, he wasn't arrested for the shirt, he was arrested for obstruction, and second, charges were dropped.
As for European attitudes toward free speech, I don't say they're wrong for Europeans, I just think some of them are daft, like locking people up for racist remarks or offensive speech. That just turns harmless idiots into martyrs.
http://deadspin.com/5896709/racist-tweets-about-fabrice-muam...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/21/man-racial...
Here's 11 people who got locked up last year:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330809/Lee-Rigby-de... (daily fail, but their info appears sound)
And that was just on the first page of google. Note that in all of these cases, the comments were just ugly and racist, but not threatening.
Portions of the U.S. used to have a strong cultural affinity for human slavery, yet many within that same U.S. argued that slavery was wrong from day 1 of the current republic. Europe used to have a cultural affinity for anti-Semitism (and it hasn't completely gone away). If you believe in any sort of objective truth whatsoever, then it's possible for a 'cultural value' to still be wrong.
"A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
From it's very inception, that phrase has been used to justify the restriction of political speech. Nothing has changed since 1917, people still use it to argue against political speech to this day.
>The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.
Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?
Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?
The improbability of anyone being hurt. If you stand in the middle of a public park and yell 'the sky is falling!!' nobody will take you very seriously, but even if they did and decided that it was necessary to run indoors the probability of a stampede occurring is vanishingly low. But maliciously causing panic in an enclosed space significantly elevates the risk of injury to others, because the more panicked people are, the more irrationally and dangerously they may act, a phenomenon for which we have abundant evidence.
What it says is that some line has to be set, and this concrete situation described is something that obviously should fall on the other side of the line. (Therefore, people should be imprisoned for speaking out against the war Q.E.D.)
Another example would be shouting "She's got a gun, arhhhh!" in a crowded plazza while setting off some firecrackers.
This isn't 1900. There are accessible, well-lit exit routes in every theater I've been in. Not to mention fire suppression systems, alarms, and the fact that you'd most likely see a fire before it was time to panic.
edit: You're overestimating the wisdom of crowds and the care of theater owners. Spraying mace in a crowded club led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_E2_nightclub_stampede
Fear that the Who would start playing early caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Who_concert_disaster
We should probably add 'doing a sound check' to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.'
This is already the case in Europe.
Is there even a right to keep private something everybody knows? A right to have milk on the floor be in the glass it spilled out of?
Free speech wasn't an absolute right in Soviet Russia either. And, yes, they too had ways of avoiding naming what they were actually doing.
The answer to your question is that the EU law is written horribly, by people who have no real idea how the internet works.
I have no idea how the EU justice system works
Then why not inform yourself before making grand pronouncements on what counts as error? There are other legal philosophies besides the one you adhere to, you know.
Sure you will, as long as you don't use Europe's neutered version of reality.
You are still allowed to find and read the original article under this EU law. You are just not entitled to have it pre-emptively collected and indexed for you if the subject of the article has a colorable wish to preserve their privacy.
I don't see that that's morally different from e.g. "you have to pay a $20 fine if you do this."
What if I have a hand-crafted artisanal search engine, like Yahoo Directory. Are those exempt from this law?
Is that your intent?
Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.
Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-w...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Human_Rights#...
Non-judges are a rather common thing among high European courts. And what would be wrong about putting someone whose publications have laid the groundwork for other judges' descisions in the past in such a position? It's not like the academic track is any less qualified.
It seems strange that people can become judges without actually practising the law or working as a judge in a lower court first. If I was being operated on, I'd want a surgeon that has operated before, not an academic expert on surgery.