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Platform Censorship: Lessons From the Copyright Wars There’s a lot of talk these days about “content moderation.” Policymakers, some public interest groups, and even some users are clamoring for intermediaries to do “more,” to make the Internet more “civil,” though there are wildly divergent views on what that “more” should be. Others vigorously oppose such moderation, arguing that encouraging the large platforms to assert and ever-greater role as Internet speech police will cause all kinds of collateral damage, particularly to already marginalized communities. Notably missing from most of these discussions is a sense of context. Fact is, there’s another arena where intermediaries have been policing online speech for decades: copyright. Since at least 1998, online intermediaries in the US and abroad have taken down or filtered out billions of websites and links, often based on nothing more than mere allegations of infringement. Part of this is due to Section 512 of the Digital Mil...

FOSTA Case Update: Court Dismisses Lawsuit Without Ruling on Whether the Statute is Unconstitutional A federal court considering a challenge to the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, or FOSTA , dismissed the case on Monday. EFF and partner law firms filed a lawsuit in June against the Justice Department on behalf of two human rights organizations, a digital library, an activist for sex workers, and a certified massage therapist to block enforcement of FOSTA. Unfortunately, a federal court sided with the government and dismissed Woodhull Freedom Foundation et al. v. United States. The court did not reach the merits of any of the constitutional issues, but instead found that none of the plaintiffs had standing to challenge the law’s legality. We’re disappointed and believe the decision is wrong. For example, the court failed to apply the standing principles that are usually applied in First Amendment cases in which the plaintiffs’ speech is chi...