A policy response to Joe Saul's legal threat to Grex

Jul 9 01:22 UTC 2000

Given the irrational desire some people have for being able to
yank their words off of Grex, even after they've probably found
their way onto dozens of people's hard drives, I propose the
following measure:

        In the interest of:
        -       Maintaining the status quo with regard to
                each user being able to verify that the
                "hide"/"censor" command is not being abused,
        -       Avoiding the creation of another "feature"
                which can be the source of abuses in turn, and
        -       Producing a semblance of peace and harmony among
                warring and possibly litigious factions, 

        The Grex staff shall remove text from the log file
        /bbs/censored under the following conditions:

        1.)     The text has been already expurgated from the original
                item file by the account user;
        2.)     Staff has received an e-mail request from the account
                from which the text was entered, naming the original
                conference, item and response number and requesting
                its permanent removal from publicly-accessible areas;
        3.)     To guarantee that the request is authentic, Staff has
                received a notarized hard copy of the same message,
                signed by the author and giving the author's full
                name and address; and
        4.)     The author has made a donation in the amount of one
                month's membership to Grex for the handling of each
                request (one response per request), said donation
                not to be considered part of any membership fees.

        Under these conditions, the Grex staff shall remove the
        requested response text from /bbs/censored and any other
        publicly-accessible files and retain or dispose of it
        according to whatever practices are current.  Grex is a
        volunteer-run system and makes no guarantee as to the
        timeliness of handling such requests.

        [In other words, if you want to purge stuff permanently and
        take it outside Grex's self-auditing system, you better be
        prepared to say you REALLY mean it, prove you're entitled to
        do it (thus covering Grex's figurative butt) and compensate
        Grex for the effort required of its staff.]

        Also, Grex shall claim an explicit license to publish and make
        available to the public as part of the normal flow of conferencing
        or accounting any new text entered in BBS according to whatever
        practices are in effect either now or in the future.

        [This is intended to claim a right to "publish" responses as
        part of a discussion item, but not to print them in a book or
        index them via a search engine without extra permission.  I'm
        willing to take revisions to this section under advisement.]

response 2 of 88:

Jul 9 03:21 UTC 2000

<snicker>

response 4 of 88:

Jul 9 14:15 UTC 2000

You can deal with the whole issue with a lot less pain by just letting people
delete their posts.  Making them jump through lots of hoops and pay money so
Grex staff can then decide whether they have earned the privilege of having
the staff delete their posts is silly.  Either people have the right to remove
their posts, or they don't.  Copyright law says they do, unless they've
explicitly agreed to give that right up.

So... either make users give that right up explicitly, thus telling them up
front how authoritarian Grex has decided to be on the subject, or let them
remove stuff freely.  Don't piddle around like Russ is.  Either of those
options will work legally.  (Though the first one won't work well with regard
to text people have already entered.)

I've said from the start that this is primarily an ethical issue, and that
I think Grex is on the wrong side, the corporate, controlling, subordinate
the rights of the individual to the voyeuristic drives of the group side.
Which strikes me as being at odds with how you guys normally portray Grex,
but image and actuality are often different.  The legal issue is secondary.
It's like someone who doesn't drive drunk because they might get arrested,
but would if they didn't think they'd get caught because they don't see that
they're putting other people at risk.  (Yes, the harm you can cause to people
with your policy here is far more trivial than that a drunk driver can cause.
But that's not my point.)  If they need the law to make them do the right
thing, that isn't very admirable.

Russ has always favored more control over BBSes by the staff and FWs.  His
biggest issue with M-Net is that we don't allow FWs toget rid of items and
responses they think are inappropriate or disruptive.  So it's completely
consistent to see him pushing a proposal that puts maximum control over
text in the hands of the staff, in the hopes everyone will hate it so much
that they reject it and users wind up with no control over entered text,
just like now.

response 6 of 88:

Jul 9 14:35 UTC 2000

I am just wondering where Rand said anything that even remotely resembled the
item text...

response 8 of 88:

Jul 9 15:40 UTC 2000

Paying to have it removed, Russ?  No freakin' way.  

response 10 of 88:

Jul 9 17:26 UTC 2000

If Scott Helmke had entered it, for example, I'd agree with you.  He has a
sense of humor.  Russ doesn't, at least on this kind of thing.

response 12 of 88:

Jul 9 20:39 UTC 2000

That's not the same, because an individual cannot reasonably assume that s/he
could delete a phone message. 

A person using BBS on Grex coming from another BBS (such as M-Net) could
reasonably assume that the "scribble" command does indeed scribble their
response. And more importantly, Grex is a publishing media, whereas an
answering machine is not. (Posting on Grex, you assume your writing to be
broadcast en masse. On an answering machine, you only expect the intended
recipient to hear it.)

response 14 of 88:

Jul 10 02:48 UTC 2000

Speaking as the person who'd probably be handling the e-mails, notarized
letters, etc. and editing /bbs/censored, my reaction to this mechanism is
*YUCK*.  I can't imagine that our heavily-worked treasurer would like it
much either.

That said, if savvy legal council told us that something like this was
the way to go to cover our rear *and* it was part of a reasonable larger
policy (that hopefully would minimize requests), i'd support it - withOUT
the $6 fee.  

As a side note, staff can't assure that stuff is removed from "publicly-
accessible files", since anybody can run newuser and repost a copy of
something in bbs or upload a copy to file & perm it r--r--r-- or similar.
The most we can do is yank something out of `official' (staff- & system-
maintained) files in /bbs.

If we (staff) were faced with a delete/repost/delete/repost/delete/repost/
etc. fight with a third party over something that the original author of
wanted to have competely deleted, could we (grex) take shelter behind some 
sort of "common carrier" or "reasonable effort" or whatever law? 

response 16 of 88:

Jul 10 04:52 UTC 2000

   I don't like Russ's idea either--it's too complicated.  Either we
let people zap their entries, or not.  Right now it seems that more
people prefer things the way they are.  Joe, can you send me email
about the laws that deal with copyright in terms of entries here?
This is something I have never thought about before, and would like
to see your analysis of it.

response 18 of 88:

Jul 10 07:04 UTC 2000

I think for Russ's proposal to have a frogs chance in the Sahara of
being passed, you'd have to cut out requirements 3 and 4 (the notorized
letter and the charge for deleting responses).  Possibly you could keep
the written request but drop the notarizaton.  I'd also delete the
licensing.  I wouldn't back this proposal with those in there.

Without those it would be at least vaguely plausible.  I could easily
write a program that would let staff delete stuff from the censored log
easily.

Of course, anyone could back up copies of the censored log, thus
capturing responses likely to be erased soon.  But what else is new.  I
believe Russ typically reads conferences by downloading them in bulk and
reading them off-line.  It would be trivial for him to keep copies of
the whole conferences.  It would be only slightly less trivial for
anyone else to do the same (when you read a conference, all the text is
sent to your computer - how hard can it be to keep it).  So if there is
anyone who really doesn't want people erasing their responses, that
person could easily archive everything they read.  So there is a degree
of futility to censoring your own responses, no matter what policy we
have.  I still think offering people even a futile version of that power
is the correct thing to do.

I like the original proposal better than this one.  But we do need an
alternative proposal.