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Grex > Coop11 > #174: A motion to protect Grex from copyright infringement suits. | |
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| 25 new of 78 responses total. |
mwg
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response 43 of 78:
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Jun 6 18:19 UTC 2000 |
I repeat, pulling copyright in to inappropriate places is a bad idea. But
if you must, consider this: Anyone with the computer sophistication to
get into a system like Grex is aware that anything they place in
discussion sections *WILL* be seen all over the world. Posting here is
like feeding your words into an on-demand printing press, then deciding
after 5000 copies have been mailed all across the world, to filch the
printing plates out of the machine.
If people are going to insist on thumping copyright law on this, simply
create a policy that says that text entered by its' creator in public
areas of Grex is placed in the public domain, without asserting any rights
over copyright material that may be posted without the consent of the
owner. If someone wanted to expose something on Grex and still retain
any semblance of copyright, they could post a file pointer to a non-public
space, the pointer would become public domain, but the file could always
be removed later.
Several people will point out that they will leave if this is implemented.
The existance of the argument pretty much indicates that some of the
losers will leave no matter what the winning position is. Accept that
this issue will drive some people away and opt for the smooth running of
Grex.
The coffee is hot.
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aaron
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response 44 of 78:
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Jun 6 18:24 UTC 2000 |
It doens't matter if the text can be seen all over the world. You can
go buy a book that can be purchased all over the world -- it isn't
public domain. You can go to a movie that can be seen all over the world --
it isn't public domain. You can watch a TV show that can be viewed all
over the world -- it isn't public domain.
And in each of those cases, the copyright holder can at any time "filch"
the printing plates. Because it is the copyright holder's intellectual
property.
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jmsaul
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response 45 of 78:
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Jun 6 18:49 UTC 2000 |
Re #43: Ah, a restatement of the "only people who are computer experts
and never make mistakes should post on BBSes" argument. You
even included the obligatory silly analogy to other types of
communication that aren't really analogous. Perfect example
of the form.
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remmers
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response 46 of 78:
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Jun 6 23:05 UTC 2000 |
I'm not going to attempt to argue with lawyers about what the law
is, but I'll stand by what I said regarding what the law should
and shouldn't be.
Here's a hypothetical for y'all: Suppose a user posts some responses,
time passes, the user stops logging in, and the account lapses. The
user then no longer has the technical ability to exercise the
scribble command on the responses. Suppose the user later decides
he wants to delete the text and is able to furnish reasonable proof
that he is the person who posted it. Is the staff obligated to
scribble the text or enable the user to do so?
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void
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response 47 of 78:
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Jun 6 23:21 UTC 2000 |
absolutely.
grex is not a governing body and has no authority to establish law,
no matter what its users might think of various laws already extant.
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remmers
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response 48 of 78:
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Jun 6 23:34 UTC 2000 |
(Of course Grex can't establish law.)
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other
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response 49 of 78:
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Jun 6 23:36 UTC 2000 |
Ok, now suppose the same case as remmers presents in resp:46 except that
the user is *not* able to prove their identity, but argues vehemently the
case that the posted text is theirs and is to be removed. Have they a
legal leg to stand on should they pursue legal remedy? Is Grex staff in
any way obligated to respond to the demands presented sans proof of
identity?
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jmsaul
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response 50 of 78:
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Jun 7 01:27 UTC 2000 |
As I explained in the agora.cf where remmers also posted this, the same thing
could happen under your current policies. The only difference would be
whether it would be possible to see the responses in /bbs/censored or not.
If that hypothetical is intended to be any kind of argument against closing
the censored log or deleteing responses entirely, it falls flat.
Re #49: Regardless of what happens to scribbled comments, Grex could be
forced by court order to scribble someone's comments if someone
were really willing to go to the trouble -- and could also be
forced to delete them entirely even if scribble doesn't do that.
It would, however, require proof of the person's identity -- and
before you all jump in with "Aha! You can't prove who anyone is
on the Internet, so it could never happen!", keep in mind that the
standard for proof in civil cases is not absolute certainty, but
merely "the preponderance of the evidence."
So what you're saying if you keep the scribble command the way it
is is not "you can't remove text, and we won't do it either,"
but instead "you can't remove text unless you're enough of an
asshole to sue us over it, in which case we'll take it out for
you." Not the message I'd want to send, but what the hey...
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other
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response 51 of 78:
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Jun 7 14:29 UTC 2000 |
OK, so in an effort to actually move this debate into the realm of
practical movement, let's look at the following options, which I think
cover all the choices being promoted in this discussion:
- Do nothing.
- Change nothing, but inform users a) that scribble saves to a publicly
readable file, and b) how to read it.
- Make /bbs/censored readable by staff only (whether or not we make
additional policy regarding how staff may access/use file contents).
- Disable/remove scribble entirely.
- Link /bbs/censored to /dev/null so that scribble actually completely
removes responses (without consideration of whether removed responses
have already been copied and/or reposted).
Now if everyone will please pick one of the above and make a condensed
argument for why this is the best choice for Grex, instead of picking
apart the choices everyone else is making, is it possible that we can
actually get done with this and make it go away?
If you're viewing this in picospan, apparently the list is not
numbered, as it is in backtalk. You can refer to the choices by number
(1 through 5).
-- Jan, is there any particular reason why backtalk
translates <ol> identically to <ul> for picospan?
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jmsaul
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response 52 of 78:
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Jun 7 15:11 UTC 2000 |
Good summary. You did leave one out, though:
* Have the scribble command completely delete responses, but leave a note
in their place telling who did the scribbling and when.
Condensed argument: People own their responses, and should be allowed to
remove them from the system. This is especially important in situations where
they've entered something they later have reason to regret, and/or where the
response in question causes harm to a third party (e.g. infringes their
privacy), but is really a basic principle. (As well as one backed by
copyright law.) Refusing to allow posters to remove responses from public
view also raises questions as to whether Grex could become liable as a
publisher for libelous material or material that invades privacy. (Grex
would already be liable for material that infringes copyright, because the
ISP immunity doesn't apply there, but Grex's existing "removal of illegal
material" policy could be stretched to cover that.)
Whether Grex retains a staff-access-only copy of removed responses is a
separate issue. The benefit for retaining one is that it permits
responses to be restored if necesary (such as if someone makes an account
with the same name as a previously expired one and kills old responses).
The downside is that, should a legal dispute involving response text ever
occur, it makes Grex a target -- both for lawsuits about the disposition
of the text and for requests for access to it. Should Grex be in the
position of maintaining records useful for suing its users, and should
Grex put itself in opposition to a user who wants the text to really be
gone for good? Does the possible benefit of being able to restore
responses outweigh that? I'd lean toward removing the material
completely, but see the merit in keeping it staff-accessible as well.
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other
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response 53 of 78:
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Jun 7 15:38 UTC 2000 |
Thank you. I think that your suggested additional option would be an
improvement over the existing option of making scribble actually remove
responses, rather than a separate option. The "who" would be obvious,
but adding a "when removed" would be valuable, as seen in context of the
dates of the adjoining/subsequent responses.
Anyone else?
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pfv
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response 54 of 78:
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Jun 7 15:41 UTC 2000 |
I especially like #52 because grex and logs are another issue.
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remmers
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response 55 of 78:
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Jun 7 16:10 UTC 2000 |
Of the various options presented, I don't know what the best choice
is because I don't know what the law is. I've read various claims
here about what the law is and what it implies for Grex, but before
basing any policy decisions on that, I would want, at the very least,
a second opinion.
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cmcgee
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response 56 of 78:
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Jun 7 16:13 UTC 2000 |
I like the option that really removes, but also leaves who and when in its
place.
I'm willing to discuss the destroy/save for staff eyes only as a separate
issue. I'm still undecided on that one.
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aaron
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response 57 of 78:
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Jun 7 17:43 UTC 2000 |
re #46: Is that your way of agreeing with Mr. Bumble, albeit on a
slightly different point of law?
re #55: Opinions aren't hard to come by.
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remmers
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response 58 of 78:
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Jun 7 17:50 UTC 2000 |
Especially around here! :)
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janc
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response 59 of 78:
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Jun 7 21:11 UTC 2000 |
On logs:
Grex keeps lots of logs of all sorts of stuff. I can tell you every
time you logged onto Grex for the last several years. I can tell you
every backtalk button you clicked for the last week, and I can tell you
the exact x/y coordinates your mouse was at when you clicked it.
It's possible that lawyers might someday descend on us demanding some of
this data. So what? I don't see that as a reason for not keeping it or
not keeping it. Yes, it might incriminate someone, but it might also
exonerate someone. And if the data is accurate, it will tend to
incriminate the guilty and exonerate the innnocent, which is probably a
good thing on the whole.
The very idea that we should avoid knowing anything because it might
involve us in a lawsuit just doesn't make any sense to me. We aren't
running a crackhouse here. We should keep it if we think it is worth
the disk space to us, and not worry one way or the other about whether
some lawyer will someday want it.
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jmsaul
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response 60 of 78:
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Jun 7 22:17 UTC 2000 |
Some of your users may feel differently. People who get sued, or threatened,
for things they post are not necessarily "guilty" of anything other than
having an opinion that disagrees with the opinion of someone with resources.
You should take the possible detrimental effects of keeping the censored text
around into account, weighing it against possible benefits.
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void
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response 61 of 78:
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Jun 7 22:54 UTC 2000 |
proposals 1, 2 and 4: utterly unacceptable.
proposal 3: better than nothing, but not best.
proposals 5 and 6: outstanding. they place ownership of and
authority over (legal) text firmly in the authors' hands, where it
should have been right from the beginning, and where grex had no right
to insert itself. from my understanding of what has been posted here
about copyright law, proposals 5 and 6 also considerably reduce the
risk of grex having to face suits brought by users who no longer wish
their work to be published.
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spooked
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response 62 of 78:
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Jun 7 23:25 UTC 2000 |
Totally disagree. Like John, I'm unsure of the law, but I think if it's
legally not a problem (and I want a neutral legal judgement) we should
remove scribble.
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scg
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response 63 of 78:
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Jun 8 00:44 UTC 2000 |
I still don't fully understand the insistence on being able to remote text
that's been entered long after the fact. I've heard the legal argument, which
may be correct but I'd really like to have a sense that we're doing the right
thing as well as the legal thing. And then there's the other argument, that
allowing people to remove their text is just how it should be, becuase the
text is theirs, with nothing further supporting that. I'm wondering if
somebody can come up with an explanation that will better convince those of
us who see no particular reason why that's how it should be.
My thought is that the conferences are not just a set of miscelanious writings
by various people, but rather a record of a conversation between a large
number of people. As such, it really seems to me that the body of work
producted is the full item, or maybe the full conference, with lots of
participants, rather than each individual response with one participant.
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janc
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response 64 of 78:
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Jun 8 02:33 UTC 2000 |
I think it's interesting how a bunch of people normally strongly
committed to free speech find themselves divided on this issue. I think
there may be two different viewpoints on free speech that are normally
aligned, but get split by this issue.
One notion of free speech wiews it as the right of the speaker to
present his or her views to the world in the manner of their own
choosing.
Another notion of free speech views it as a device to put as much
information as possible out in public view by allowing everyone to say
everything they have to say, without restriction.
On most free speech topics, these views are complementary. I think I
believe in both of them. But in this discussion of the right to
*withdraw* your past utterances from public view, they lead to
diametrically opposite conclusions. So I find myself having to weigh
these two ideas against each other.
Let's presume that some person feels mortified with embarrasment over
something they said on Grex. They know they can't erase it from the
memory of people who already saw it, but they want to prevent future
people from wanting to see it. They reasons why they might feel this
way hardly matter. Why shouldn't we let this person erase the text?
The answers given so far seem to boil down to:
- The discussion as a whole is a kind of collective work of which
this person's mortification and embarrassment is likely to be
a critical component. If this person's stupid statement is
removed, then future readers won't be able to fully appreciate
the clever ways in which all the other users told him he was an
idiot, and might even question their justification for doing so.
- If we don't keep reproducing this person's mistakes forever, then
other people might start thinking it is OK to make mistakes.
Obviously, I don't buy the argument that collective need for keeping
everything visible can override the individual's need to control their
own speech in these cases. I just don't believe that many responses are
so valuable to the community that we can't stand to allow their authors
to withdraw them.
Actually, I think the best argument for not allowing self-censorship is
that if self-censorship becomes popular, then people will start
including quotes of the responses they are responding to in their
responses more often. This would make the conference look excessively
like net news or mailing lists. Yuck. But I don't think this is a very
good argument either, because I don't think it will happen much.
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gelinas
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response 65 of 78:
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Jun 8 04:38 UTC 2000 |
I don't think it will happen at all. It doesn't happen now, when people
scribble or expurgate their responses, does it? Why should that change
when the permanent record is hidden or removed?
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pfv
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response 66 of 78:
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Jun 8 07:50 UTC 2000 |
Well, the quoting DOES happen - but it's just damned infrequent.
Usually, I see it done when 1 reply is addressing several early
replies. Alternately, I've seen it done when dissecting a prior
post, or in the case of comments to one or two lines/sentences.
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aaron
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response 67 of 78:
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Jun 8 15:22 UTC 2000 |
I imagine that, an item or two from now, a number of grexers will be
demanding second opinions as to what those octagonal red signs mean,
at traffic intersections. "Now, people have suggested that they mean
'Stop', but I want a second opinion." "I've heard what people said, but
I'm not entirely convinced that the signs mean 'Stop', and if they do
I think it's still a voluntary thing."
There is something of a philosophical clash, but I don't think it is
over what "free speech" means. I think it is over control. But that's
an issue entirely apart from what the law requires. And those who
advocate ignoring the law really should do better than their present
nothing, when it comes to finding authority for their position.
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