Sweden

An Increase in Infringement or the Promotion of Censorship? The Growing Tension of VPN Use

In the days of unwarranted government surveillance and elaborate data collection, people increasingly rely on anonymizing services to keep their online activities private, such as proxy servers, encrypted cloud storage, and virtual private networks. Virtual private networks, or VPNs, route online communications through a secure and encrypted private network to a remote server (sometimes in a jurisdiction with greater protection for freedom of speech or weaker law enforcement).

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Avast! The Pirate Bay's Intellectual Property's Been Boarded!

If you haven't heard of The Pirate Bay by now, you may want to emerge from that cave, wipe the sleepies from your eyes, and start getting caught up on your backed up WIRED magazines in the bathroom. The Pirate Bay (TPB) is a website run by a few Swedish intellectual property anarchists. TPB provides a comprehensive indexing service for BitTorrent files.

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Liberte, Egalite, Technologie: The French Resistance and the Anti-Piracy Campaign

The music and motion picture industries suffered a setback in their global anti-piracy carpet-bombing campaign on June 10, when the French Conseil Constitutionnel struck down the internet-banning portions of the HADOPI law.

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Unnamed Businessman v. Disqus

Date: 

12/07/2007

Threat Type: 

Correspondence

Party Receiving Legal Threat: 

Disqus

Type of Party: 

Individual

Type of Party: 

Organization
Intermediary

Publication Medium: 

Website

Status: 

Concluded

Disposition: 

Material Removed

Description: 

Disqus is a provider of a website comment system, which enables website operators and bloggers to fight spam and manage the comments appearing on their platforms. It also allows commenters to create profiles that store their comments from all websites and blogs using the Disqus system and incorporate ratings from other Disqus users. In December 2007, an individual claiming to be the president of a European company sent an email to Daniel Ha, a Disqus co-founder. The email complained about a comment appearing on a Disqus-enabled site. (In his post about the situation, Mr. Ha declined to identify the businessman or the site where the comment appeared.) The email demanded that Disqus remove the allegedly defamatory comment and threatened legal action in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States if the company failed to comply.

Mr. Ha refused to remove the comment and responded to the email, arguing that the decision about whether or not to remove the comment belonged to the site operator originally hosting it, not Disqus. He also invoked CDA 230, which protects providers and users of interactive computer services from tort liability for the statements of third parties. Mr. Ha exchanged further correspondence with the unnamed businessman, but maintained his position that Disqus would not remove the comment.

In a follow-up comment to his blog post on the situation, Mr. Ha indicated that the site owner contacted him and indicated that the comment would be removed. The situation thus appears to be resolved.

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