The Internet, and before it, computers, broke our legal system. There are loads of things that we decided were bad and banned, but "thing but on computer" or "thing but online" somehow were interpreted to be exempt.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.
The video store example is funny because iirc, it wasn’t until someone high up/very involved in government got bit by it. During Robert Bork’s failed Supreme Court confirmation, a reporter figured out he rented porn. Maybe it was something less raunchy / embarrassing than porn but either way, iirc, they got that law on the books fast after that….
The leak was inspired by Bork's opposition to privacy protections beyond those explicitly outlined in the constitution. [0]
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. [1]
The VPPA very much applies to online entities. Netflix can collect all the info it wants about you, but is very much limited in what it can share with external parties.
If anything, the law has given cover to shady walled garden business practices that would not have survived otherwise.
You read wrongly. The 2013 amendment merely allowed customers to consent to disclosure electronically via the Internet. Before then, it had to be in writing. It didn't change 18 USC § 2710's explicit application only to a "video tape service provider", and that is how the law still reads today.
I think until now, the only real thing preserving these consumer protections (and civil rights, while we're at it) was simply the practical difficulty of collecting and compiling that information. Now it's trivial and effortless to collect this information. The old laws still apply, but now the rubber meets the road in actually having them enforced.
>"thing but on computer"
From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
How about liability for publishers? New York Times publishes something damaging and false? Liable! YouTube publishes something damaging and false but since they did it with a computer they're immune!
Now that youtube and meta and tiktok choose what is put in front of you they are the publishers. But the law, passed for the early web, is stuck in the past.
Congratulations, you fell victim to the 'platform vs publisher' liability misinformation. It doesn't work like that and has never worked like that, nor should it except for the perfidious pushers of that misinformation.
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
If a librarian put a book out on the front table with a "recommended reading" sign then yeah that seems fair for them to carry some liability if that book were actually libelous. And so it should be for recommended posts on sites like Youtube, Instagram, etc. A chronological or alphabetical index is a factual catalogue of information. A recommendation is you vouching for the material. Totally different.
> Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
It worked like that before they changed the law and it can work like that again.
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.