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Grex > Coop11 > #174: A motion to protect Grex from copyright infringement suits. | |
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| 18 new of 78 responses total. |
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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remmers
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response 68 of 78:
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Jun 8 17:26 UTC 2000 |
Hm, who's advocating ignoring the law?
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aaron
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response 69 of 78:
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Jun 8 22:34 UTC 2000 |
What's the law, John, and what evidence do you have for your position?
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scg
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response 70 of 78:
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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.
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aaron
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response 71 of 78:
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Jun 9 13:28 UTC 2000 |
1. There is a difference between a newspaper's reporting on newsworthy
events and what Grex does, which is recognized in such basic documents
as the U.S. Constitution.
2. Even public citizens have a right to protect their words, as Gerald
Ford proved when he successfully recovered damages for a publication's
excessive excerpting of his memoirs in a "book review."
3. Presenting excerpts of a public speech, in accord with the Fair Use
doctrine, is very different from presenting all of a public statement
or speech. Speeches and statements reported in full are usually intended
to be reported in full, or are intended to be in the public domain.
4. Grex has no creative input into user comments, and other than prompts
and error messages, can't be said to in any way participate in those
discussions. Hyde Park doesn't get the right to speakers' rantings,
just because it provides a forum.
5. If the "public discussion" is a spoken discussion, the words aren't
reduced to a fixed medium and, although quite possibly still under
copyright, are quite unlike words typed into Grex.
6. I must have missed the definition of "pure writing" in the United States
Code, as it relates to copyright. Please explain this "purity" standard.
7. If arguing that things are intuitively wrong, without providing any
basis for that argument, doesn't impress you, how should we perceive #70?
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danr
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response 72 of 78:
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Jul 17 01:16 UTC 2000 |
After reading this entire item, I'm of the opinion, that those that have posted
stuff here have given Grex an implicit license to publish those posts.
Certainly, most users posting items and responses know that those posts and
responses are going to be publicly readable. Indeed, the reason they're posting
them is so that others can see them.
Also, it might be a good idea to do something along the lines of #0 to make
that license more explicit. If that pisses off some users, so be it. They can
decide to accept the conditions of use or not.
Those users who choose not to accept them and go elsewhere may have some good
reasons for doing so. Personally, I think they're just being silly.
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gelinas
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response 73 of 78:
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Jul 17 01:32 UTC 2000 |
The problem with making the license explicit is what do you do with the
material for which an explicit license is denied or unobtainable? If you
need an explicit license, then the unlicensed material MUST be deleted
(you've admitted you don't have a license to continue publishing it).
Given the extent of material that would not be explicitly licensed, you'd
have to eliminate just about everything, including destroying backup tapes,
and start over.
Is this proposal worth that much trouble?
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scott
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response 74 of 78:
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Jul 17 01:58 UTC 2000 |
I don't think so, but others are making a very big deal about it.
FWIW, I voted to deperm the censored log. But I'm not a fanatic about the
sanctity of my text...
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srw
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response 75 of 78:
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Jul 17 05:30 UTC 2000 |
Glad to see that DanR picked up on my position that Grex obtains a
license to publish the text by the act of posting it. I see no
particular reason to make this license more explicit, as it is fairly
obvious, since it is the only point of posting, but if a lawyer
representing Grex felt it would be in our interest to make this license
more explicit, I would not argue on that point.
As before, I think that Grex should not always exercise that license.
Although we have the legal right to continue publishing the text in this
case, we shouldn't always exercise it. I believe that this policy would
make Grex better serve its users. Thuis is why I don't think that
copyright law forces any policy on us in this case.
The case of when the author wants us to retract it from view is one case
that I would like to see our policy be to honor that request. That's why
I voted in the minority. THere are other cases, too. Consider that A
utters something to B in confidence, and B then posts it. If A complains
to Grex and can convince us that what is posted was A's text in the
first place, so that A is the author, not B. Thus B granted us a license
it didn't have the right to grant. I can see situations like this in
which Grex might want to have the flexibility to remove the post. It's
all gray area, admittedly.
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janc
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response 76 of 78:
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Jul 19 15:27 UTC 2000 |
Nobody is questioning that any posting text here is implicitly licensing
us to display it. That's obvious.
The question is, what are the terms of that implicit license? What
rights exactly has the poster yielded to Grex?
I'm no student of the law, but I think there is only one sensible way
the law can work here: an implicit license has to be assumed to give
Grex only the most minimal and obvious set of rights. Claiming any
rights beyond that would be like claiming you granted me the right to
move into your house by yelling "hello" to me from your porch as I
walked by.
Right now, there is nothing obvious about Grex's claim that you can't
revoke postings. Quite the contrary. Picospan offers a "expurgate" and
"scribble" command, and Backtalk puts an "erase" button next to each of
your responses. A person might very reasonably assume that he has the
right to remove responses. Even in the absense of those, it might be a
reasonable assumption. The fact that so many other sites do allow
deletion is enough to prove that assumption reasonable.
I think if a statement appeared regularly and prominently that said
something like "Text posted here can never be completely erased" then
that would be enough to make it clear to people that this is the case,
and I'd think that would be enough to cover us on this one point even
without writing out a complete formal license.
What it would *not* do would be to change things for people who posted
in the past. The implicit or explicit license that applies is clearly
the one "in force" at the time the message was posted. That being the
case, I think we have no legal leg to stand on in refusing to erase
anything currently on Grex, and writing new licenses or warning messages
won't change that.
But the legal aspects aren't the main point for me. Yes, the law
matters, but it is important to think about what it is we *want* to do.
I think the sensible default for a free speech system is to allow
authors to retain as many rights to and as much control over their own
words as we can reasonably allow. We shouldn't limit people without a
compelling reason for doing so. I fail to see any such compelling
reason here.
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srw
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response 77 of 78:
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Jul 21 03:12 UTC 2000 |
Well, neither do I, Jan, so we completely agree as to strategy, with
each other at least, if not with the majority of members.
All I seem to disagree with you is whether we're legally obligated to
change our policy.
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cmcgee
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response 78 of 78:
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Jul 21 15:35 UTC 2000 |
Well, I voted in the minority too, and I really like Jan's explication in 76:
"I think the sensible default for a free speech system is to allow
authors to retain as many rights to and as much control over their own
words as we can reasonably allow. We shouldn't limit people without a
compelling reason for doing so. I fail to see any such compelling
reason here."
I agree that if we aren't going to allow people to "remove" their words,
we need to be much more explicit that we do not ALLOW people to remove,
scribble, expurgate or otherwise permanently conceal what they've written.
Not that we can't, but that we won't.
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