response 46 of 78:

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?

response 48 of 78:

Jun 6 23:34 UTC 2000

(Of course Grex can't establish law.)

response 50 of 78:

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...

response 52 of 78:

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.

response 54 of 78:

Jun 7 15:41 UTC 2000

        I especially like #52 because grex and logs are another issue.

response 56 of 78:

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.

response 58 of 78:

Jun 7 17:50 UTC 2000

Especially around here!  :)

response 60 of 78:

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.

response 62 of 78:

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.

response 64 of 78:

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.

response 66 of 78:

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.

response 68 of 78:

Jun 8 17:26 UTC 2000

Hm, who's advocating ignoring the law?

response 70 of 78:

Jun 9 04:43 UTC 2000

I refuse to believe that Grex has no legal flexibility on this issue.  While
I don't know the details of them, the copyright law certainly has exceptions
for fair use, and for reporting events.  If somebody, even a "private citizen"
gives a speech in a public place, it's certainly ok for newspapers to report
what was said, even in some cases printing transcripts of the speech.  It's
fairly logical that participating in a discussion on Grex could be considered
to be participating in a public discussion, rather than pure writing in the
sense that copyright usually applies to.

Quite aside from that, there have been various proposals, including the one
this item started with, to have users grant Grex a license to their writing.
I'm really skeptical as to the legal need for that, but certainly if Grex were
to get such a license from its users, even if the law really is so rediculous
as to say that we can't normally keep a public record of what our users type
here, such a licensing arrangement would presumably override copyright
provisions that only apply when such a license hasn't been granted.

The question, then, is what we should be doing, and once we figure out what
we should be doing, then we can figure out how to do that within the legal
requirements.  Quite frankly, insisting that something is intuitively wrong,
with no basis provided on which to convince others of that point, really
doesn't impress me.