The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just hired two new staffers focused on the EU: Icelandic poet, artist, and free expression activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and European Internet policy expert Christoph Schmon. Read the rest

[Stanford's Daphne Keller is a preeminent cyberlawyer and one of the world's leading experts on "intermediary liability" -- that is, when an online service should be held responsible for the actions of this user. She brings us a delightful tale of Facebook's inability to moderate content at scale, which is as much of a tale of the impossibility (and foolishness) of trying to support 2.3 billion users (who will generate 2,300 one-in-a-million edge-cases every day) as it is about a specific failure. We're delighted to get the chance to run this after a larger, more prestigious, longer running publication spiked it because it had a penis in it. Be warned: there is a willie after the jump. -Cory]

Those of us who study the rules that Internet platforms apply to online speech have increasingly rich data about platforms’ removal decisions. Sources like transparency reports provide a statistical big picture, aggregating individual takedown decisions. Read the rest

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has launched a signature drive to get the UK Home Secretary, Theresa May, to intervene to stop the extradition to the USA of Richard O'Dwyer, who created the TVShack website. TVShack had links to places from which users could download TV shows, and was legal under UK law. The US entertainment lobby has demanded O'Dwyer be rendered to an American court, which may persecute him for violating the law of a distant land. As Wales writes, it's time to stop letting the entertainment industry's priorities define the regulatory regime for the Internet.

Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean it can or should be unlimited. It does not mean that we should abandon time-honoured moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.

One of the important moral principles that has made everything we relish about the internet possible, from Wikipedia to YouTube, is that internet service providers need to have a safe harbour from what their users do. There are and should be some limits to this. Under US copyright law, there are notice and take-down provisions requiring service providers to remove content under a properly formatted notification. And there is a distinction between hosting copyrighted material and telling people where it is. The latter is protected under the first amendment.

When I met Richard (along with his mother), he struck me as a clean-cut, geeky kid.