Not at all! I and other comment authors on this thread have mentioned that because of the nature of both the law and the internet, abuse is highly unlikely.
This means that the 100% certain probability that people are currently marginally hurt by search-engine-magnified sleazy journalism far outweighs the almost-negligible probability of high-magnitude abuse of the law.
Other threads on this story have also dealt with other mitigating factors which decrease the probability of abuse, such as the fact that public figures are excluded.
I'm not trivializing censorship; I'm entering a cost-benefit analysis where the importance of an impact is a function of both its probability and the magnitude of the impact, instead of attributing certainty to every outcome and reasoning on impact alone.
Incidentally even the US Supreme Court -- a country where free speech and anti-censorship are (constitutionally) paramount -- does this sort of analysis. Libel, inciting violence, and a slew of other exceptions to free speech have been upheld by that court.
What I'm doing is considering the overall welfare of society, instead of picking and choosing individual issues that always much come first no matter what. In this case, there's a clear and present good done by the law and the chances of bad things happening are minimized by safeguards.
edit: my comments are sometimes living documents. Mostly tweaking of the last 2 paragraphs.
This means that the 100% certain probability that people are currently marginally hurt by search-engine-magnified sleazy journalism far outweighs the almost-negligible probability of high-magnitude abuse of the law.
Other threads on this story have also dealt with other mitigating factors which decrease the probability of abuse, such as the fact that public figures are excluded.
I'm not trivializing censorship; I'm entering a cost-benefit analysis where the importance of an impact is a function of both its probability and the magnitude of the impact, instead of attributing certainty to every outcome and reasoning on impact alone.
Incidentally even the US Supreme Court -- a country where free speech and anti-censorship are (constitutionally) paramount -- does this sort of analysis. Libel, inciting violence, and a slew of other exceptions to free speech have been upheld by that court.
What I'm doing is considering the overall welfare of society, instead of picking and choosing individual issues that always much come first no matter what. In this case, there's a clear and present good done by the law and the chances of bad things happening are minimized by safeguards.
edit: my comments are sometimes living documents. Mostly tweaking of the last 2 paragraphs.