Section 230 Debate Underway

 The first stage of a 2-part hearing into Section 230 is now underway. For many in the entertainment industry, this debate is long overdue. Section 230 has historically been used by Big Tech companies to dodge and contort their way out of taking responsibility for copyright and IP violations of artists and entertainers on their platforms. While these may not be the most highlighted aspects of the current debate, it’s one whose resolution matters greatly to the industry. Entertainment lawyer at Blake & Wang P.A, Brandon Blake, fills us in further.

                                                                        Brandon Blake

A long time coming

Section 230 immunity is definitely something that meant well once, but has come to be a thorn in the side of more than just the entertainment industry. The world has swiftly evolved into a digital age driven by social media far beyond early predictions. Social media tech giants were not anticipated, at least at the time it was written into the Communications Decency Act, to come to hold such power as they now have, and the protection seemed reasonable at the time. 

Now, however, we’ve weathered a landscape in which ‘false news’, extremism, misinformation campaigns, and even civil rights abuses have helped to showcase the pains and risks the entertainment industry has been warning about for years very vividly. It’s inevitable that, given such blanket immunity and permission to evade responsibility, it will be used. Not the nicest or easiest subjects to share a bed with, but at least the point is well proved to those who scoffed at the notion of intellectual property theft and copyright infringement as things that mattered in social spaces.

Sticky debate

To date, however, all the proposed amendments fail to satisfy at least one side of the floor. We get it, it’s a thorny issue (although one that should have been tackled when entertainment first warned it was rising). At least it seems that entertainment voices are no longer the only ones who feel it's time for some sensible revisions to its blanket immunity. 

As now-notorious Facebook ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen has said on the debate, we can only hope that the debate does not become so mired in a long, drawn-out debate over the minutiae of different legislative approaches’ that they fall into the inertia trap. Let’s hope, instead, that the ground is laid for a better way to approach these matters going forward. We will be watching this one with eager interest.