Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
No it didn't. The ECJ ruled that Google couldn't be made to censor American search results, but they still have to censor them in France. Yet the newspaper is not required to censor itself.
Why are these two cases different?
Because Google explicitly avail themselves of a law that says "if you don't want to be held responsible [under freedom of speech] of what you publish, then you have to follow different rules [that limit your freedom of speech]."
Google could very well claim freedom of speech for their content if they wished to, but then it would mean that all usual rules about public speech would apply to them, and they would be responsible for any libel, slander etc. that appears on their pages. That's how the law works. You can't both have your cake and eat it, and both say "I'm entitled to keep whatever content I want because freedom of speech", and "I'm not responsible for content that I show and that abuses that freedom."
I guess the point is that putting "a link to a news article that's embarrassing because it's true" in the same bucket as "libel or kiddie porn" just seems outrageous. Obviously, other countries are free (hah!) to make laws like that. They can't make me think that they make any sense, though, and it seems like the kind of law that our government wouldn't be allowed to make under our Constitution.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Because Google explicitly avail themselves of a law that says "if you don't want to be held responsible [under freedom of speech] of what you publish, then you have to follow different rules [that limit your freedom of speech]."
Does this law exist? I've never seen anyone bring this up in relation to a French/EU law. The guy who said there was a law like this in America was mistaken.
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@boomzilla I can understand how it might seem like that (and obviously since we're discussing different legal/moral frameworks, I very much understand that it seems outrageous when looking at it through a different framework!).
But I think it kind of makes sense when you think about why those two things end up in the same bucket. It's not that someone said that those two things should be treated the same, it's just that they are both considered as abuses to free speech (since right to privacy is one of the fundamental rights recognised by the EU, article 8, and the courts judged that keeping the links was infringing on that right).
I mean, from a purely logical point of view, I don't have issue with the chain of reasoning (as set out in various rulings) that the court followed to reach this verdict, starting from what they take as axioms (e.g. the chart of fundamental rights). Of course you're not going to agree on those axioms (and actually I also probably don't), but I can't really fault the chain of reasoning.
Different things end up in the "same bucket" exactly in the same way as you can end up in prison for either smoking a joint or raping 42 kids. Doesn't mean those two things are the same.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Because Google explicitly avail themselves of a law that says "if you don't want to be held responsible [under freedom of speech] of what you publish, then you have to follow different rules [that limit your freedom of speech]."
Does this law exist? I've never seen anyone bring this up in relation to a French/EU law. The guy who said there was a law like this in America was mistaken.
Of the top of my head and without checking if there are more, yes, this law very much exists. It's usually abridged as LCEN and is regularly edited/changed.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_pour_la_confiance_dans_l'économie_numérique
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
But as you pointed out yourself, the ECJ overturned the French ruling. So we're effectively in the situation of a lower court that was overruled by a higher one and legally speaking, that means the lower court was wrong.
If you go back and check, we're ostensibly supposed to be talking about a new EU data privacy rule that affects Facebook.
And if you go back and check, I felt "uneasy" about the new rule. Not that the rule was itself a travesty as written, but that it could expand in travastic ways, like with what the French court tried to do here before getting stopped by the ECJ.
Maybe Facebook, or one of its smaller competitors, will just go along with French law rather than spend the time and money to contest the case at the ECJ.
That's the use case I'm worried about.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear Official text:
(but good luck to actually read and understand it... even if it wasn't in French!)
I think the relevant bit is article 6 (butchered by myself to try and keep things readable/translatable):
Les personnes physiques ou morales qui assurent le stockage d'écrits fournis par des destinataires de ces services ne peuvent pas voir leur responsabilité civile engagée du fait des informations stockées si elles n'avaient pas effectivement connaissance de leur caractère manifestement illicite ou si, dès le moment où elles en ont eu cette connaissance, elles ont agi promptement pour retirer ces données ou en rendre l'accès impossible.
Rough translation (as close to the text as possible, but very ugly):
Moral or physical persons that provide the storage of writings provided by users of those services cannot have their civil responsibility engaged because of the stored information if they did not knew of the obviously illicit character or if, as soon as they knew it, they promptly acted to remove those data or make accessing them impossible.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
And if you go back and check, I felt "uneasy" about the new rule. Not that the rule was itself a travesty as written, but that it could expand in travastic ways, like with what the French court tried to do here before getting stopped by the ECJ.
Well I didn't say anything about the original topic. I just reacted on posts that said it was something that was already done.
Feel free to worry all you want (and I may even join you), but don't claim that this is an extension of the current law status, because from the examples we've actually looked at in this thread, is very much is not.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear Official text:
(but good luck to actually read and understand it... even if it wasn't in French!)
I think the relevant bit is article 6 (butchered by myself to try and keep things readable/translatable):
Les personnes physiques ou morales qui assurent le stockage d'écrits fournis par des destinataires de ces services ne peuvent pas voir leur responsabilité civile engagée du fait des informations stockées si elles n'avaient pas effectivement connaissance de leur caractère manifestement illicite ou si, dès le moment où elles en ont eu cette connaissance, elles ont agi promptement pour retirer ces données ou en rendre l'accès impossible.
Rough translation (as close to the text as possible, but very ugly):
Moral or physical persons [i.e. companies or individuals, in French legal jargon] that provide the storage of writings provided by users of those services cannot have their civil responsibility [libel etc. is a "civil" offense in French law] engaged because of the stored information if they did not knew of the obviously illicit character [i.e. if they did not actually read the content before publishing it, like a newspaper does!] or if, as soon as they knew it, they promptly acted to remove those data or make accessing them impossible.
That's not the part that says that search engines don't count as "the media" and thus aren't entitled to Free Press rights.
My reading of your English translation of the French law says that a newspaper that published something false without realizing it, then retracted as soon as it found out, wouldn't be able to be sued.
(This happens to be how libel law works in the US.)
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear Official text:
(but good luck to actually read and understand it... even if it wasn't in French!)
I think the relevant bit is article 6 (butchered by myself to try and keep things readable/translatable):
Les personnes physiques ou morales qui assurent le stockage d'écrits fournis par des destinataires de ces services ne peuvent pas voir leur responsabilité civile engagée du fait des informations stockées si elles n'avaient pas effectivement connaissance de leur caractère manifestement illicite ou si, dès le moment où elles en ont eu cette connaissance, elles ont agi promptement pour retirer ces données ou en rendre l'accès impossible.
Rough translation (as close to the text as possible, but very ugly):
Moral or physical persons [i.e. companies or individuals, in French legal jargon] that provide the storage of writings provided by users of those services cannot have their civil responsibility [libel etc. is a "civil" offense in French law] engaged because of the stored information if they did not knew of the obviously illicit character [i.e. if they did not actually read the content before publishing it, like a newspaper does!] or if, as soon as they knew it, they promptly acted to remove those data or make accessing them impossible.
That's not the part that says that search engines don't count as "the media" and thus aren't entitled to Free Press rights.
Well you'll forgive me for not reading and translating all the law and laws that refer to it. Especially since you won't find anything explicitly about free speech or the media in there, because legalese... It's likely you'll find what you want in other laws about e.g. data preservation, with those laws explicitly saying stuff like "providers of services as defined by article N of LCEN are subject to..."
Read some of the actual court rulings on privacy cases (first one I found) to see which law articles the court referred to, but here also, good luck to read that...
My reading of your English translation of the French law says that a newspaper that published something false without realizing it, then retracted as soon as it found out, wouldn't be able to be sued.
Actually your reading is wrong because a newspaper wouldn't be a "provider of services" [yada yada lengthy description] under this article, since their content is provided by themselves (their employees or contractors). For contents that they publish themselves, the relevant bits are actually the laws on freedom of speech and their abuses (libel etc.), and indeed "honest error + quick retraction" would very much be a valid protection in that case. But the point is, this is not covered by the law I quoted but by other very generic laws that apply in the same way to all individuals and all means of publication (down to e.g. simply saying it publicly in a meeting).
Though you are entirely right when it comes to bits of news web sites where they do act as providers of services, i.e. user comments!
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Actually your reading is wrong because a newspaper wouldn't be a "provider of services" [yada yada lengthy description] under this article, since their content is provided by themselves (their employees or contractors). For contents that they publish themselves, the relevant bits are actually the laws on freedom of speech and their abuses (libel etc.), and indeed "honest error + quick retraction" would very much be a valid protection in that case. But the point is, this is not covered by the law I quoted but by other very generic laws that apply in the same way to all individuals and all means of publication..
That's exactly why I said that the law you quoted wasn't relevant.
The way I see it, Google's search engine results are Google's [owners'] own speech, created by Google employees or contractors with the assistance of a tool that Google['s owners] paid for.
That speech is of the form of a series of statements that amount to "There's a web page that uses the phrase $SEARCH_TERM at $LINK." Google's protection from liability comes from the fact that the statement at issue is a sufficiently anodyne statement that it is very unlikely to be defamatory, especially to someone other that whoever owns the webserver at $LINK.
How is publishing those statements different than publishing a newspaper?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
The way I see it, Google's search engine results are Google's [owners'] own speech, created by Google employees or contractors with the assistance of a tool that Google['s owners] paid for.
That's very much not how the French law sees them. To the French law, Google is a "provider of content" and their search results are not showing Google's own speech (or rather, not "only", no one contests that Google adds their own bits for which they are of course entirely responsible -- because for those bits they are not providers, but authors, and responsible of it like any other author e.g. a newspaper).
It's, what's the word, "constant jurisprudence?" of the courts that Google is one of those "providers of content." You're free to not take my word for it, but at that point, there is little I can do to convince you apart from telling you to read countless court rulings in French. That law has been around since 2004, it has been used many times, at all possible legal levels, there is absolutely no doubt on that part. Not even Google contests it.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
That's very much not how the French law sees them. To the French law, Google is a "provider of content" and their search results are not showing Google's own speech
That's my point. French law, by making that distinction, is unjust.
You guys tried to come liberate us, but the ECJ slapped you down.
Google is big enough to take the case to the ECJ, but not everybody is. The reason I'm worried about the new EU rule we're ostensibly talking about is that some companies are going to decide to play ball with the rules of EU countries that they don't actually have to comply with.
This could be prevented if EU countries only had just laws, which is what I'm advocating for.
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At a more fundamental level, France can't dictate what people can do when all parties are outside France.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
That's very much not how the French law sees them. To the French law, Google is a "provider of content" and their search results are not showing Google's own speech
That's my point. French law, by making that distinction, is unjust.
There you are, bringing again your own frame of reference to a different one. I'm not discussing that.
You guys tried to come liberate us, but the ECJ slapped you down.
You're mixing things. The ECJ has never (that I know) contradicted a French court on this "provider of content" regulation for Google. Quite the contrary, since it uphold the part where the French court is allowed to force Google to remove links in the EU, it very much accepted that distinction.
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@error well then I guess you'll be happy that this isn't what it does (see ECJ ruling discussed above).
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@error well then I guess you'll be happy that this isn't what it does (see ECJ ruling discussed above).
It tried to enforce its laws outside its jurisdiction but the ECJ said it couldn't. I'm not sure we're disagreeing here.
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@error I guess it depends how you intended the first "can't" in your previous post. I read it as "France should not try to..." but if you wrote it as "France has no legal power to..." then yes, we agree (even if it took one round trip to the highest court to get there, but that's exactly the same as something going to the Supreme Court).
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
I read it as "France should not try to..." but if you wrote it as "France has no legal power to..."
I meant the latter, but I feel the latter implies the former. France should not try to do things that it has no legal power to do.
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@error yes, it's pointless (and morally wrong) for a court to try and enforce something that isn't in their power, I agree on that as well. In other words, given the final ruling, the lower court should not have ruled otherwise. But that's how the justice system works, anywhere, so apart from saying that this specific judge (or court) was wrong, I don't think there is anything here about "France." A judge is not "France", nor "the French government", nor even "the French justice."
It's like saying that because the SC would overturn a ruling made by a lower judge in Texas, "Texas" should not have done X or Y. I get that it's a communication shortcut, but in this instance, it sends the wrong message.
(edit: it would be different if we were talking about a French law, voted by the French parliament, that was overruled by the ECJ, but that's very much not what this is about)
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
It's like saying that because the SC would overturn a ruling made by a lower judge in Texas, "Texas" should not have done X or Y.
This analogy might not be perfect. Texas has its own supreme court. State laws are tried in state court, federal laws are tried in federal court. The SCOTUS can overturn a state law in the case it is found to be unconstitutional. If you go through the appeal process for violating a Texas law, you're going through the Texas appellate court system, and the last stop there is the Texas Supreme Court. The SCOTUS is a federal court, and wouldn't hear a state case unless it involved Constitutional law.
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@error said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
This analogy might not be perfect.
Be glad I didn't try for a car analogy
...You got my point though (I hope?), that ruling had nothing to do with "France."
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@error I guess it depends how you intended the first "can't" in your previous post. I read it as "France should not try to..." but if you wrote it as "France has no legal power to..." then yes, we agree (even if it took one round trip to the highest court to get there, but that's exactly the same as something going to the Supreme Court).
Yeah, wait a second.
Are you saying it's OK for a government to try to do things it has no legal power to do?
This is why I don't want French law being applied in the US, and why I don't necessarily trust the European Court of Justice to stop it from happening.
Also, if most French people think it's OK for the government to do things they have no legal power to do, I'm not crazy about French law being applied in France.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@error I guess it depends how you intended the first "can't" in your previous post. I read it as "France should not try to..." but if you wrote it as "France has no legal power to..." then yes, we agree (even if it took one round trip to the highest court to get there, but that's exactly the same as something going to the Supreme Court).
Yeah, wait a second.
Are you saying it's OK for a government to try to do things it has no legal power to do?
No
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Ok, you really want a discussion about legal systems, so let's go on.
You're wrong about how US law works, but I'm interested in the underlying principle. Why do Google's owners lose some of their rights by acting in a group rather than as individuals? How many people makes a big enough group for the government to try to take away their rights?Actually, after some digging, I have found out that I've been completely wrong.
Even in Europe, the question of Human Rights of "legal persons" (organizations, corporations) is highly controversial. Apparently at least one country (Austria) maintain that corporations do not have Human Rights, while the Constitutional Court in its neighbor (Czechia) found out that corporations do have Human Rights (apparently some companies already got wind of it and applied for wellfare benefits, but this info is from a questionable source). Both countries share most of its legal history (1526-1918, 1938-1945).
So, at least in some parts of EU, Google (and Facebook, too) can claim Freedom of Speech without any qualifiers.
This will be interesting, because in most EU countries, there are political parties that want to force Facebook and Twitter to start or stop censoring the content.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
You got my point though (I hope?), that ruling had nothing to do with "France."
I think you're saying that we shouldn't conflate the ruling of a judge in France with the entirety of the French judicial system.
Again we have a major cultural difference. The US court system is very concerned with consistency. The concept of precedent is very important: if a judge rules on a case similar to a case prior to it, he is obliged to make the same ruling. If a higher court overturns a ruling, it also overturns the rulings on equivalent cases. This makes case law just as important as statutory law.
In other words, we're very concerned with ensuring our judicial system acts within a consensus. Once a judge has made a ruling, and that ruling hasn't yet been overturned, that ruling can be seen as the opinion of the entire judicial system.
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@error said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Once a judge has made a ruling, and that ruling hasn't yet been overturned, that ruling can be seen as the opinion of
the entire judicial systemthat jurisdiction.A court in one jurisdiction is not bound by the precedent of another jurisdiction. It is bound by the precedent of a superior ("parent" or "grandparent") court, but not of a "sibling" or "uncle" court. (I just made up the use of familial terms to indicate the relationships between courts; I hope it clarifies what I'm talking about and doesn't add confusion.) A state court is not bound by the decision of a court in a different state. It may be guided by it, but often not, because the laws of state A are different than the laws of state B, and so each court will apply the laws of its own state. A decision by, say, the 3rd Circuit is not binding on District Courts in the 4th Circuit, but if the 3rd Circuit and 4th Circuit issue conflicting decisions, the Supreme Court may step in to resolve the disagreement, and its decision becomes binding on everyone.
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@HardwareGeek I've heard one tactic to get a case heard by the Supreme Court is trying two very similar cases in two different circuits and hoping to get conflicting rulings, so the SCOTUS will need to resolve the discrepancy.
In general, it's hard to get a case in front of the SCOTUS.
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@error said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
I think you're saying that we shouldn't conflate the ruling of a judge in France with the entirety of the French judicial system.
No, I'm saying you should neither conflate an overturned ruling with an upheld (or uncontested one), nor should you conflate an upheld ruling with a law voted (enacted) by the government. And yes, a ruling is part of the body of previous law that a judge would use to reach a verdict in a different case, but again, we're talking about a judge whose ruling was overturned.
I mean, essentially, once a higher court (be it a French one or the ECJ) has overturned a lower court ruling, that lower court ruling is as good as non-existent. I fail to see how saying that could provoke anything than an agreement, unless there is really something fundamental about the US judicial system that I don't know.
Once a judge has made a ruling, and that ruling hasn't yet been overturned, that ruling can be seen as the opinion of the entire judicial system.
I'm beginning to think that I am really, really bad at explaining my ideas, because I really, really cannot see how you can read what I wrote and still believe I'm talking about a ruling that hasn't yet been overturned.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
No, I'm saying you should neither conflate an overturned ruling with an upheld (or uncontested one), nor should you conflate an upheld ruling with a law voted (enacted) by the government.
AFAICT no one has done this. We (
ians in this thread) looked at a ruling that had been overturned, agreed that it should have been, and expressed concern that the lower court (referred to as "France" which was 
ed about) tried to get away with something ridiculous.I'm beginning to think that I am really, really bad at explaining my ideas,
Maybe.
believe I'm talking about a ruling that hasn't yet been overturned.
We all acknowledge it was overturned! But the court formerly known as France tried to enforce its law outside its jurisdiction. It didn't work, we all agree, and it shouldn't have.
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@error said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
the lower court (referred to as "France" which was
ed about)Yes, and that's exactly what this subthread is about, this
ing. One court in France is NOT "France." That's all.tried to get away with something ridiculous.
I'm impressed that you are so attentive to a foreign (to you) judicial system that you have time to worry about one isolated overturned ruling. Can you give me your opinion on all those, and those of the 36 other Appeal Courts, and for previous two centuries and not just 2 years, and for all the other even higher courts up to the ECJ, and tell me which ones of those cause you concern?
(yes, that's sarcasm, because I'm annoyed how you keep using that one single decision that was overturned as if it was somehow representative of the whole politics of France)
I'm going to stop here, because either we agree and we're just splitting hairs, or we don't and we'll get nowhere, or I just can't express my ideas and given how much I've written a few more posts will not change that.
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@remi You made the analogy of the US Supreme Court overturning a state court ruling. The US Supreme Court would only concern itself with a state ruling if the state had overstepped its jurisdiction. To the extent that the Texas jurisdiction speaks with a unified voice, it would be entirely fair to say that Texas had tried to do something and was stopped by the SCOTUS. It would also be notable because states usually are allowed to manage their own affairs, with the federal government only interfering in extreme circumstances.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Google is big enough to take the case to the ECJ, but not everybody is.
Everyone can. Individual people have, and have won cases.
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@error well then it was a shitty analogy. I guess by making that analogy once, that erased all the posts I made before and after (insert "overturn decision" or "SC overrules everything else" joke).
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@error said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
the lower court (referred to as "France" which was
ed about)Yes, and that's exactly what this subthread is about, this
ing. One court in France is NOT "France." That's all.Uh...hmmm...so you're saying they should have said "that one French Court" instead? The two seem synonymous to me for the purpose of this discussion. Different parts of the government are often in conflict or just have different agendas but they're still acting with the force of the government, which was the point here, AFAICT.
EDIT: It's possible this is a cultural / linguistic thing that's confusing everyone.
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@boomzilla I think the two are very different in the signal they send in this discussion, even if I would probably be the first to make the confusion in many cases. If you read back, the mood of this thread was very much about how "France" (or the EU) as a whole, from a government level, was/is pushing for some control. Said this way, that's very much a political statement. The French government wants to etc.
OTOH, I hope that we all agree that sometimes an individual judge can mess up. This is (part of) why there exists appeal processes in the first place. It's not good when that happens, of course, and it's a bit of a grey area about the legal status of obviously wrong decisions while the appeal process is pending (I mean, legally speaking it's not a grey area at all, but morally it's not so clear). But once the appeal is done, we can safely say (depending on the result) that the individual judge simply did a mistake, or was a dumbass (and maybe that they should be fired). In that case, it seems wrong to me to say that "France" made a bad decision -- maybe everyone in government in France went
went the lower court announced it (probably not, but the point is that just looking at the decision, we can't know). If a judge is drunk and on crack when he happens to give a ruling (that is later overturned, as it should), would you say that "France" is on drugs? (well you probably would say that in the garage, but I hope not in a serious discussion)Now if the court decision had been upheld by all French appeal levels, until it went one up to the ECJ which overturned it, that would be a slightly different thing, because while one lower court can get it wrong simply because of human error, if several levels do so, you can start to assume that it does indeed reflect the legal position of the whole judicial system, and thus by extension, of "France."
But I'll point out here that first, no-one ever hinted at this, so it seems like no-one considered anything but the lower level judge in isolation and thought it accurately represented the whole of France (which is wrong, to me). And second, if someone had pointed it out I would have referred to the actual ECJ ruling that starts by explaining that actually the ECJ was appealed to by the French appeal court (Conseil d'État in this case for procedural
) because that court said in essence "ok, we got an appeal on the basis of EU law, so let's directly go and get the answer from the correct source." So we're much in the case of an isolated judge making a error, and the immediate appeal above him overturning the decision (by redirecting the question to the proper court, which is just the maze of judicial procedure).So really, in this case, I have a very hard time to see how you can conflate this decision with the whole government.
That's still a minor
overall, though when discussing the political leanings of a country, I think it's relevant.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@boomzilla I think the two are very different in the signal they send in this discussion, even if I would probably be the first to make the confusion in many cases. If you read back, the mood of this thread was very much about how "France" (or the EU) as a whole, from a government level, was/is pushing for some control. Said this way, that's very much a political statement. The French government wants to etc.
Well hang on a minute. The French Data Protection Authority (the CNIL) isn't actually a court, but an "independent administrative authority" within the French government.
In the US, a fine from an "independent administrative authority" (like the Environmental Protection Agency) can initially be appealed to an "administrative court" within the agency itself. (In theory, the agency court's judges have more specialized knowledge than the real courts.)
I kind of assumed the CNIL worked the same way, because ultimately, the fine should be appealable to someone other than whoever issued the fine.
But looking more closely at the CNIL's website, that does not appear to be the case, and it looks like the appeal for CNIL fines goes to regular French/EU courts. When I said "the French court," I meant the appeals body within CNIL that doesn't exist.
The ECJ ruling doesn't mention a French court as having ruled on this at all. (The Conseil d'État didn't rule until after the ECJ ruling) The CNIL is the French government, not their courts.
(If I'm wrong about there not being a French court that ruled before the ECJ, that means that both the French government and at least one French court agreed.)
This is an overstep by the French government. I feel that it's fair to attribute that to "France."
OTOH, I hope that we all agree that sometimes an individual judge can mess up.
I can't really speak to individual judges making mistakes. At least not here. If you're interested, go to the garage and ask me about John Roberts and I'll let you know how I really feel.
If a judge is drunk and on crack when he happens to give a ruling (that is later overturned, as it should), would you say that "France" is on drugs? (well you probably would say that in the garage, but I hope not in a serious discussion)
We have more emojis that mean "I'm just trolling" than eskimos have words for snow. I'd use one of them.
That's still a minor
overall, though when discussing the political leanings of a country, I think it's relevant.My point was more around "Restricting the right to Freedom of the Press to Media Organizations is bananaland crazy." That restriction appears to be pretty firmly in place in French law according to their government and courts.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
The CNIL is the French government, not their courts.
Meh. I'm not convinced by that. Despite being pretty toothless, the CNIL has several times been at odds with the official government position and is even called to rule upon government decisions or plans (one of the latest occurrence I can remember is about the contact tracking app, but let's not go there...), so I don't think it's fair to describe them as "the French government." It's supposed to be independent, in the same way as a court is, so you can say that their rulings are part of the overall legislative and judicial body that makes up "France" (and again, this is why this distinction is really minor), but saying it's the government position is wrong.
For a
US analogy, that's a bit like saying that the FBI investigation on the Trump-Russia thing was "the US." I don't think many people in the US government at the time agreed on it being their position, and that's despite the FBI being much less independent (on paper) from the US government than the CNIL is from the French government. So it's not totally inaccurate, from afar, to say that it's "France", or "the US", but as soon as you go into details, it's quite different, and that was my point here.This is an overstep by the French government. I feel that it's fair to attribute that to "France."
Whatever. That distinction always was a minor thing. The key thing is that it... did... not... stay. Bringing it up actually only proves that this will not happen again, since there is now a clear and unambiguous ruling about that specific point form the highest court. So even if it were to represent "France" (which again I don't think it did), it doesn't matter what "France" might have wanted, since it was clearly told that it was not possible.
My point was more around "Restricting the right to Freedom of the Press to Media Organizations is bananaland crazy." That restriction appears to be pretty firmly in place in French law according to their government and courts.
I'm giving up on trying to explain to you that French law does not recognise Media Organisations (when it comes to freedom of speech), nor that there isn't any "freedom of press" (different from freedom of speech). I'm also giving up on trying to explain that French law has a special category for entities who want to not be responsible about the content they publish, and that this category has special rules, and that no one, starting from Google, contests this distinction.
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@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
The CNIL is the French government, not their courts.
Meh. I'm not convinced by that. Despite being pretty toothless, the CNIL has several times been at odds with the official government position and is even called to rule upon government decisions or plans (one of the latest occurrence I can remember is about the contact tracking app, but let's not go there...), so I don't think it's fair to describe them as "the French government." It's supposed to be independent, in the same way as a court is, so you can say that their rulings are part of the overall legislative and judicial body that makes up "France" (and again, this is why this distinction is really minor), but saying it's the government position is wrong.
OK fine. In the US, "Independent Agency" in practice still means "the President is supposed to run it, but there's opportunities for hijinks." If they're actually closer to a court, then they're closer to a court and I'm worried about a French court overstepping rather than the French government.
For a
US analogy, that's a bit like saying that the FBI investigation on the Trump-Russia thing was "the US." I don't think many people in the US government at the time agreed on it being their position, and that's despite the FBI being much less independent (on paper) from the US government than the CNIL is from the French government.I think the analogy is a good one, with one exception, but I disagree with it wholeheartedly.
The actions that the FBI took in the Trump-Russia investigation are absolutely attributable to the US government.
It's fair to criticize Americans for selecting the politicans that ring-led the thing, especially if they don't punish those politicans when they're on the ballot next month.
The disagreement I have with you on the analogy is that entirely too many Americans knew it was a hoax and supported it anyway. I don't want to get too specific about the criticisms because this isn't the garage and because being French, you ideally don't give a shit.
But this is a fair criticism of "the US", the US government, and Americans generally. It'd be a fair criticism of a French agency similar to the FBI also. To the extent that the French government opposes this CNIL ruling, it's not a fair criticism of the French government.
This is an overstep by the French government. I feel that it's fair to attribute that to "France."
Whatever. That distinction always was a minor thing. The key thing is that it... did... not... stay. Bringing it up actually only proves that this will not happen again, since there is now a clear and unambiguous ruling about that specific point form the highest court. So even if it were to represent "France" (which again I don't think it did), it doesn't matter what "France" might have wanted, since it was clearly told that it was not possible.
Like I said initially, I'm worried about governments using "soft power" to encourage companies (especially smaller companies than Google) to do things that they're not technically required to do, like enact global policies within their own business that happen to comply with dumb EU laws.
There's certainly an appetite to do that among the CNIL. And although WTDWTF might not be representative of Europe as a whole, there's certainly an appetite for that from the non-Americans in this thread.
My point was more around "Restricting the right to Freedom of the Press to Media Organizations is bananaland crazy." That restriction appears to be pretty firmly in place in French law according to their government and courts.
I'm giving up on trying to explain to you that French law does not recognise Media Organisations (when it comes to freedom of speech), nor that there isn't any "freedom of press" (different from freedom of speech). I'm also giving up on trying to explain that French law has a special category for entities who want to not be responsible about the content they publish, and that this category has special rules, and that no one, starting from Google, contests this distinction.
That's a distinction without a difference, especially since for Google to be liable for the stuff that's in its search results, you need to pretend that Google isn't by definition quoting someone else.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@remi said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
The CNIL is the French government, not their courts.
Meh. I'm not convinced by that. Despite being pretty toothless, the CNIL has several times been at odds with the official government position and is even called to rule upon government decisions or plans (one of the latest occurrence I can remember is about the contact tracking app, but let's not go there...), so I don't think it's fair to describe them as "the French government." It's supposed to be independent, in the same way as a court is, so you can say that their rulings are part of the overall legislative and judicial body that makes up "France" (and again, this is why this distinction is really minor), but saying it's the government position is wrong.
OK fine. In the US, "Independent Agency" in practice still means "the President is supposed to run it, but there's opportunities for hijinks." If they're actually closer to a court, then they're closer to a court and I'm worried about a French court overstepping rather than the French government.
I guess the error was mine then, "independent" doesn't mean the same thing in both countries and I got confused by that. So yes, the CNIL is very much closer to a court than to an government agency, in terms of their legal autonomy. The government (officially) does not tell them what to do, and they can rule against the government (in cases where the government would be one of the parties).
In fact, the fact that appealing their decisions is done to the Conseil d'État tells me that they are probably on a similar footing to other lower courts whose appeal is to the Conseil d'État. Those other courts are regular courts, except that for
they only rule on cases where (at least) one party is a public administration (body, agency...). So if you have some beef with your local council, or with the taxman, or with any public administration (disability benefits, social security...), or with the state itself, you would bring a case in front of an Administrative Court, which is totally independent and may (and does!) rule against the state. An appeal of a ruling of those courts is done to the Conseil d'État.So for me, the CNIL is very much at the same level as those courts, even though it has a different name (and actually a different scope since when it rules between e.g. an individual and Google, no public administration is involved, but I don't think that's really a big difference, morally speaking).
Anyway, let's close that
ing that has already gone for much too long.Like I said initially, I'm worried about governments using "soft power" to encourage companies (especially smaller companies than Google) to do things that they're not technically required to do, like enact global policies within their own business that happen to comply with dumb EU laws.
There's certainly an appetite to do that among the CNIL. And although WTDWTF might not be representative of Europe as a whole, there's certainly an appetite for that from the non-Americans in this thread.
Well I don't necessarily disagree with your worry (though I may disagree on the details...), but I think it's wise to differentiate between what is, what could be (subject to simply a new law), and what cannot be (because it's been explicitly ruled against at a level high-enough that it would be hard to change). Just so we can worry for the right reasons.
Now if you're worried that companies will obey EU rules even if they are not forced to, well then I guess this shows you're worried that the US is loosing its international clout
That's a distinction without a difference, especially since for Google to be liable for the stuff that's in its search results, you need to pretend that Google isn't by definition quoting someone else.
That they are quoting does not mean they are not responsible for distributing it. If a publisher prints and sells a book that they know contains things that are abuses of the freedom of speech (libel, pornography or whatever -- I know the definition of what's an "abuse of freedom of speech" is in practice very different in the EU and the US, but on the moral level, that notion exists everywhere), my view (and that of the EU law) is that they are morally in part responsible. In a trial, they would be tried and condemned in parallel to the actual author (not necessarily in the same way, but they would be there).
In fact, a defamation (for example) is only punishable if it was made public somehow, so the entity causing the publication is, in the law, a key element of the offense. That has been a fundamental principle in French law since the 19th century. So it's very well established, in French law, that saying "I wasn't the author of this content" isn't a receivable excuse. As long as you did publish it, you hold (some) responsibility for it.
I guess you probably fundamentally disagree with this, but at that point, like before, unless you intend to liberate us, there's nothing you can do about it.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
I don't think we're as far apart as you seem to think we are.
@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
- What are rights? Where do they come from?
Rights are certain things that we, as a society, have come to the conclusion are "inalienable",.. Or, rather, that they should be, from a shared ethical/moral point of view.
- Are rights universal? Do they apply across cultures and across time?
Ideally, yes. In practice, no.
I lumped questions 1 and 4 together because the answers kind of affect each other.
If rights are decided as a consensus from the society's shared morals and ethics, it's likely that societies from different cultures and different times will come up with different rights. Even here, apparently, the EU has come up with The Right to be Forgotten.
If rights are supposed to be universal, then it seems to me that either the US is wrong for not implementing the Right to be Forgotten, or the EU is wrong for granting RTBF the status of "right."
If rights are decided by consensus, which is what actually happens (obviously), by something society has derived from a shared ethical principle, then ideally different societies might come up with the same rights. This would lend strong credence to these rights and the principles they were derived from.
That doesn't mean it happens automatically across different societies (quite apparently), and certainly what we now view as "rights" hasn't always been historically been viewed as such, even if we retrospectively think that people back then should have had those rights. In this sense they are "universal" as we reached this consensus in thinking that they should always apply. We probably wouldn't call them rights if we didn't deem they should apply universally, but does that mean there is a natural source they come from, making them actually universal? Maybe not. Is there a shared set of axioms and fundamental principles that everyone can agree on and from which, after enough thinking, we can all come to the same conclusions about what is a right? That's the part were the "ideally" comes in again, but I'm not sure about it.
Also, it might be possible that the same principles could lead to different sets of rights that are non-comparable/equally good under the judging criteria (think something like maximizing for the best possible rules of society), e.g. different "rights" {A,B} and {C, D, E} are just as good, or even {A, B} and {A, B, C} are just as good. I'm not actually sure if that's a possible scenario, as certain things we consider very fundamental look like they are indeed the only "natural" conclusion. But bear in mind that even for the rights to "life" and "liberty" we have exceptions in every single society.In the case at hand, I would accept your argument that the "right to be forgotten" isn't universally accepted as fundamental enough to be a right. So it's "just a law" (the RTBF name is not official anyway and thus the EU didn't "grant it the status of right"), but that doesn't mean as much as you argue for. Many important laws don't directly correspond to a fundamental "right" in that sense, and having or not having a certain law can still make for a better or worse society. So I can still make the argument that the US is effectively worse off for failing to provide such a law, even if it's not what you call a "right". (But admittedly I was making that argument mostly because of getting annoyed at the constant American exceptionalism arguments combined with the universal jurisdiction claims, when the US basically does that all the time.)
Specific laws often have flaws, but I would view something as the "right to privacy", which has lead to the GDPR et al., as a fundamental and important thing. You're going to tell me it's something completely different, but still, the 4th Amendment ensures some form of the idea of privacy.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
You're fighting against abortion,
I'mwe're both fighting against capital punishment)See? I told you we have more in common than you think.
I am honestly surprised by that.
(More so because of the "US Conservative" aspect than because of the "Christian" aspect, but the Old Testament seems to disagree with you.)For you that might be because it's dictated by an imaginary entity, for me they are derived, among others, from basic philosophy like the "golden rule" and being for the greater good of everyone.
As far as governance goes, the question is really whether all rights are meant to apply to everyone equally. It sounds like you believe they come from Nature, rather than Nature's God (to steal a phrase from Jefferson.) That's not the largest difference in the world.
Assuming as I said above that we derive these rights philosophically, it's a deep question if we are actually "discovering" them from the rules of nature or "inventing" them on a broad philosophical consensus. I usually view what is commonly called "human rights" as universal without giving it much thought, but that doesn't mean I've answered this question.
I do agree that the distinction between "Nature" and "Nature's God" is not a big difference.Also, the Golden Rule is in the Bible. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" It's a great rule, and I get why non-Christians have adopted it. But Jesus originally said it.
As has been mentioned already, I don't think Jesus originally said it. It's a very simple rule that is easy to come up with and very fundamental, so it's probably been formulated independently many times. That it is widely accepted, e.g. as you said by Christians and non-Christians, says less about its originator(s) (whoever they may be) and more that it is indeed a very good rule.
(I don't know if the phrase "Golden Rule" is uniquely associated with the bible version. That may very well be, I only used that phrase as it's what I have heard it called in English)- Is there a difference between the government's obligations due to laws and its obligations due to rights?
A government is only restricted by law / its constitution (and people not revolting), assuming it's democratic and restricted at all. Ideally, the constitution includes those rights, and even better makes it hard to impossible to change that aspect.
When I wrote the question, I was thinking that government's obligations are by definition "ought" rather than "is." Of course there are tyrannical governments, which are out of the scope of the question. Ought the government treat obligations due to rights more carefully than obligations due to laws?
I agree with you that it's important for the parts of the Constitution that deal with rights to be hard to impossible to change.
- Is there a definitive, complete list of rights? If there isn't, is there some lower-level set of principles that can be used to figure out whether something is or is not a right?
No, there is no complete list. Some have been evolved more recently, although arguably only as continuation / details of others. There probably are some philosophical principles to figure that out, but I can't quite describe them right now. Not everyone is going to agree on the principles, though, so you're not going to agree on the results, either.
OK, I'll take that as an answer. Going forward, though, it might be an interesting thought experiment to think about why you believe in the rights that you believe in.
I'd ask the same of you, but that'd be a fruitless answer and I shall refrain from any further garage-worthy discussion in this post.
- Are there any laws that the government should be prevented from making?
Should? Yes, that's obvious. For example, killing the Jews should've been prevented....
I kind of meant more categorically, but OK.
Hitler was elected with democratic majorities and apparently had a consensus among his citizens. In a world where different societies come up with different conceptions of rights, what's wrong with a conception that says "Rights don't apply to Jews?"
I think
would have some ry about majority vs plurality here, and the parliamentary parts involved force, but let's ignore that.Irrespective of the conclusion if the origin of rights are "natural" or not, we can still judge them on what we have agreed on as rights, and more practically, what the outcome of that conception was. The results speak for themselves.
Coming back to your original question I guess that means that the government should be prevented from making laws that fundamentally go against what we deem is right and good, but we already agreed on that without discussing if that notion comes naturally.
Sorry for the late reply, been pretty busy.
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@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Sorry for the late reply, been pretty busy.
Nah, dude. This is cool. I'm enjoying this. Hope you are too.
I've got stuff going on here too. I owe you a thoughtful answer to this post. Unfortunately it's late here, so that's probably going to take until tomorrow afternoon my time
@remi, I owe you a good answer to your post too.
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Haven't been following this thread. Has anyone convinced anyone of anything?
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@Gąska said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Haven't been following this thread. Has anyone convinced anyone of anything?
Has that ever happened, anywhere?
It's not been jeffed to the garage, so I guess it's been going well.
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@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@Gąska said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Haven't been following this thread. Has anyone convinced anyone of anything?
Has that ever happened, anywhere?
There was this one time when I convinced @Zenith (I think it was @Zenith) that still using WinAPI ini file manipulation functions in 2019 was indeed a bad idea, being deprecated for two decades and all. So yes, it does happen from time to time
(Please don't ask for another example, I don't have any.)
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@Gąska said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
(Please don't ask for another example, I don't have any.)
Well, I think that several people have managed to convince other people that they were morons (to clarify: I'm not talking about this thread, or at least not about me as one of those "other people"), even in some cases where they initially thought they weren't. There was one such post very recently in one of the active garage threads.
(also feel free to interpret "they" in the previous convoluted sentence in the wrongest way possible for maximum
)I'm not sure it's really what you had in mind when asking if "anyone [has] convinced anyone of anything", but hey, it's
.
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@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
the RTBF name is not official anyway and thus the EU didn't "grant it the status of right"
You know what, that's also what I thought initially, but it's actually wrong. It is stated as a right by the EU in the GDRP. The official text of article 17 uses "RTBF" in the title, which is just a title and not official law, but then it says:
"The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her [...]"
So, OK, if you want to be ultra-
it's a right "to obtain the erasure of personal data", not a right "to be forgotten." But the text of the law does clearly state that it is a "right", not just a set of restrictions part of a law.Though I'm not sure what it changes in practice. If we're (well, you, because I'm not really interested in that sub-thread) talking morals, whether the word of the law says "right" or not doesn't really matter. Only the spirit of the law matters for morals and I don't think there is much doubt that the EU intends it to be a "right" in the moral sense.
If talking legal subtleties and procedure... I guess we'd need a true (EU) lawyer to explain what are the exact implications of a text saying that someone has a "right" (as opposed to just saying what the rest of the article says i.e. that "the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data", which IMO would have been enough to make the law usable?).
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@remi, I owe you a good answer to your post too.
Don't sweat it. We've bored to death everyone else in this thread, so we can take our time discussing whatever we want now, no one is reading us anyway
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@Gąska said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@Gąska said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
Haven't been following this thread. Has anyone convinced anyone of anything?
Has that ever happened, anywhere?
There was this one time when I convinced @Zenith (I think it was @Zenith) that still using WinAPI ini file manipulation functions in 2019 was indeed a bad idea, being deprecated for two decades and all. So yes, it does happen from time to time
(Please don't ask for another example, I don't have any.)
I recently convinced @Polygeekery that a crazy chick wasn't fugly (as he judged from pictures of her in jail) and that she cleans up nicely.
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@boomzilla said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
I recently convinced @Polygeekery that a crazy chick wasn't fugly (as he judged from pictures of her in jail) and that she cleans up nicely.
I'm not sure this just didn't hit different versions of Polygeekery, to be specific the sober and drunk variation.
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@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
I don't think we're as far apart as you seem to think we are.
@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
- What are rights? Where do they come from?
Rights are certain things that we, as a society, have come to the conclusion are "inalienable",.. Or, rather, that they should be, from a shared ethical/moral point of view.
- Are rights universal? Do they apply across cultures and across time?
Ideally, yes. In practice, no.
I lumped questions 1 and 4 together because the answers kind of affect each other.
If rights are decided as a consensus from the society's shared morals and ethics, it's likely that societies from different cultures and different times will come up with different rights. Even here, apparently, the EU has come up with The Right to be Forgotten.
If rights are supposed to be universal, then it seems to me that either the US is wrong for not implementing the Right to be Forgotten, or the EU is wrong for granting RTBF the status of "right."
If rights are decided by consensus, which is what actually happens (obviously), by something society has derived from a shared ethical principle, then ideally different societies might come up with the same rights. This would lend strong credence to these rights and the principles they were derived from.
That doesn't mean it happens automatically across different societies (quite apparently), and certainly what we now view as "rights" hasn't always been historically been viewed as such, even if we retrospectively think that people back then should have had those rights. In this sense they are "universal" as we reached this consensus in thinking that they should always apply. We probably wouldn't call them rights if we didn't deem they should apply universally, but does that mean there is a natural source they come from, making them actually universal? Maybe not. Is there a shared set of axioms and fundamental principles that everyone can agree on and from which, after enough thinking, we can all come to the same conclusions about what is a right? That's the part were the "ideally" comes in again, but I'm not sure about it.If we can't all come to the same conclusions about natural rights, isn't all that's left a giant Prisoner's Dilemma? To the extent that anything is a natural right rather than a pure power play, natural rights have to be universal. Otherwise, is there really anything wrong with biasing your society's list of "natural rights" so they favor your group over the other guy's group?"
On the other hand, if people from all societies can independently sit down and reason out the same set of fundamental axioms and principles, there must be something biasing all of our thought processes towards that set of axioms and principles, right? Just like anything else on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? That "something" is human nature. Is human nature that way because Nature's God made it that way? (Perhaps, but it's not fundamental to the point.)
@topspin said in Another GDPR? Electric googleoo?:
In the case at hand, I would accept your argument that the "right to be forgotten" isn't universally accepted as fundamental enough to be a right. So it's "just a law" (the RTBF name is not official anyway and thus the EU didn't "grant it the status of right"), but that doesn't mean as much as you argue for. Many important laws don't directly correspond to a fundamental "right" in that sense, and having or not having a certain law can still make for a better or worse society. So I can still make the argument that the US is effectively worse off for failing to provide such a law, even if it's not what you call a "right". (But admittedly I was making that argument mostly because of getting annoyed at the constant American exceptionalism arguments combined with the universal jurisdiction claims, when the US basically does that all the time.)
This is something @remi pointed out, and he makes a good point. The word "right" is overloaded to mean things other than natural law rights. You have "rights" under the law that aren't natural law rights. You also have contractual rights if you and the other party agree to them in a contract.
I was previously referring to the latter two classes of "rights" as "not a right," but that's not how language works. (In my defense, I'm normally typing on my phone, although this is on a real keyboard.) I'm being more specific about "natural law rights" starting in this post.
Specific laws often have flaws, but I would view something as the "right to privacy", which has lead to the GDPR et al., as a fundamental and important thing. You're going to tell me it's something completely different, but still, the 4th Amendment ensures some form of the idea of privacy.
You guessed correctly; I view the right to privacy more narrowly than you do. The 4th Amendment, for example, does not guarantee a generalized right to privacy. It guarantees a right to keep certain things private from the government.
Here's the thing with the GDPR and the RTBF. The RTBF doesn't actually protect privacy (your ability to refuse to reveal facts that you don't want disclosed). It allows you to prevent certain organizations from publishing facts that they already know.
And [the owners of] an organization that publishes facts has the right to do so because they have natural right to Freedom of the Press. The RTBF is a right under law which is not backed by a natural right. That's a real category, but they're not allowed to interfere with natural rights.
You're fighting against abortion,
I'mwe're both fighting against capital punishment)See? I told you we have more in common than you think.
I am honestly surprised by that.
(More so because of the "US Conservative" aspect than because of the "Christian" aspect, but the Old Testament seems to disagree with you.)Here's the difference between the Old Testament view of the death penalty and modern Christian opposition to it.
Obviously, self defense is allowed. So is third person self defense. A cop who's getting shot at by a crook is allowed to shoot back. Of course.
There's a difference between "in the moment, it's him or me" self defense and the state executing someone as part of a justice process. In a nomadic/agrarian society like those covered in both the Old and New Testaments, the "state", such as it was, literally didn't have the resources to keep a criminal imprisoned for long periods of time. They're obligated to do everything they can do short of killing the guy, which isn't much. This is the mechanic which ultimately forces the "state" into "in the moment, it's him or us" calls.
In nearly any modern society with the death penalty, it's not applied in an "in the moment, this guy is imminently dangerous" scenario. And since modern society ultimately does have the resources to imprison a criminal indefinitely, we have more tools at our disposal short of killing the guy which we're obliged to use.
For you that might be because it's dictated by an imaginary entity, for me they are derived, among others, from basic philosophy like the "golden rule" and being for the greater good of everyone.
As far as governance goes, the question is really whether all rights are meant to apply to everyone equally. It sounds like you believe they come from Nature, rather than Nature's God (to steal a phrase from Jefferson.) That's not the largest difference in the world.
Assuming as I said above that we derive these rights philosophically, it's a deep question if we are actually "discovering" them from the rules of nature or "inventing" them on a broad philosophical consensus. I usually view what is commonly called "human rights" as universal without giving it much thought, but that doesn't mean I've answered this question.
Like I said above, to the extent that natural rights exist, they have to be universal. The alternative is that rights apply to some groups but not others, which is outside what people normally mean when they say natural rights.
Also, the Golden Rule is in the Bible. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" It's a great rule, and I get why non-Christians have adopted it. But Jesus originally said it.
As has been mentioned already, I don't think Jesus originally said it. It's a very simple rule that is easy to come up with and very fundamental, so it's probably been formulated independently many times. That it is widely accepted, e.g. as you said by Christians and non-Christians, says less about its originator(s) (whoever they may be) and more that it is indeed a very good rule.
(I don't know if the phrase "Golden Rule" is uniquely associated with the bible version. That may very well be, I only used that phrase as it's what I have heard it called in English)Well, Jesus is part of "one God in three persons" and He created the entire moral order, so He did originally say it.
When Christ says it in the New Testament, he's paraphrasing the Old Testament to an audience that was familiar with His source material. The rule was already well known in Ancient Jewish society at the time of Christ. Other societies had also already written down essentially the same rule in other forms by that point.
The point I was making was that you knew about the rule through some sort of cultural reference. Because you used the phrase "The Golden Rule" and because, I speculated, you would be familiar with the "Do unto others..." wording specifically, that your cultural reference was itself influenced by the New Testament version of the rule rather than some other version.
- Is there a definitive, complete list of rights? If there isn't, is there some lower-level set of principles that can be used to figure out whether something is or is not a right?
No, there is no complete list. Some have been evolved more recently, although arguably only as continuation / details of others. There probably are some philosophical principles to figure that out, but I can't quite describe them right now. Not everyone is going to agree on the principles, though, so you're not going to agree on the results, either.
OK, I'll take that as an answer. Going forward, though, it might be an interesting thought experiment to think about why you believe in the rights that you believe in.
I'd ask the same of you, but that'd be a fruitless answer and I shall refrain from any further garage-worthy discussion in this post.
I feel that I answered all the questions that I asked you in my prior posts in the topic. I don't think my answer is particularly garage-worthy. It is as follows:
I don't think it is possible to make a definitive, complete list of all the natural rights. However, using Locke's principles (All men have a right to life, liberty, and private property), we can reason through whether proposals are indeed natural rights.
- Are there any laws that the government should be prevented from making?
Should? Yes, that's obvious. For example, killing the Jews should've been prevented....
I kind of meant more categorically, but OK.
Hitler was elected with democratic majorities and apparently had a consensus among his citizens. In a world where different societies come up with different conceptions of rights, what's wrong with a conception that says "Rights don't apply to Jews?"
I think
would have some ry about majority vs plurality here, and the parliamentary parts involved force, but let's ignore that.Irrespective of the conclusion if the origin of rights are "natural" or not, we can still judge them on what we have agreed on as rights, and more practically, what the outcome of that conception was. The results speak for themselves.
This implies a universal morality, right? I mean I believe that, obviously,
But if you do assume a universal morality, there's an at least decent argument that the Venn diagram between "the list of things you shouldn't do to someone because it would be immoral" and "the list of things you shouldn't do to someone because it would violate their rights" is probably
apretty close to a circle. Right? It's late, and I'm shooting from the hip on this. Pull requests accepted.FAKE EDIT: There are immoral things you can say to someone as well, but this list is only of immoral things you can do. Also, with a little more thought, there's some sex stuff that's immoral but not necessarily violative of rights. If I were to put a little more thought into it, there's probably more.
Coming back to your original question I guess that means that the government should be prevented from making laws that fundamentally go against what we deem is right and good, but we already agreed on that without discussing if that notion comes naturally.
I think we disagree here, actually. I'm arguing that governments should be prevented from making laws that violate people's natural rights, even if "the people at large" deem laws right and good. In the GDPR context, this comes back around to "RTBF is a legal right. Because it's a legal right, it is not allowed to violate Freedom of the Press, which is a natural right."
Loi n° 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004 pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique (1). - Légifrance
