Thanks, Rich, for a thoughtful post. Rich Graves wrote:
My take on the issues I see here:
1) Moderator liability and anonymous posting. The open nature of the list means that "copyright violations" threads and the like are thought more or less safe for the people who own toad.com. With moderation, this is less likely to be as "safe." Without calling for a blanket assault on copyrights (I do have friends who make their living as writers), and speaking only selfishly, I think it would be a shame to lose the "copyright violations" posts. So I think we need a way to diminish or at least distribute moderator liability. Let's revisit the "Member of Parliament Problem" thread of a month or so ago for solutions. Presumably STUMP or some other moderation tool could be modified to support a secure anonymous- approval protocol.
I hope that lawyers here could comment on this, and I hope that it is relevant to the cupherpunks issues at hand. You gave us another example of why charters that restrict moderators' ability to reject posts are good. In soc.culture.russian.moderated we had a similar problem (now resolved completely), when certain anonymous posters posted articles that looked like articles from newspapers. After long thinking, moderator board has come with the following solution: 1) We do not know for sure if a certain post violates some copyrights or not 2) We do not have a duty to verify copyrights or check whether posts are libelous. Verifying it is not very practical. 3) Our co-moderators reside in different countries and these countries may have different copyright laws 4) Since the moderation is done by many people, it is hard to say (as long as you did not see our logs which we regularly delete) who really approved the questioned article 5) Our charter does NOT give us a permission to reject copyright violations (which may be and are freely posted to unmoderated groups and lists anyhow). There is also a related issue of moderators' responsibility for libel. Our position was the following: libel involves some lies that damages people's reputations. We cannot verify truthfulness of articles, therefore we cannot tell libel from non-libel. A classical example was the following: we have an Orthodox Jewish poster. Suppose someone else posts an article where he describes that poster as eating pork regularly. Such an article can, in theory, be rather damaging for that person, and would be libelous if untrue. We are not necessarily aware that Jewish customs involve prohibition on eating swines, and so we cannot know that the post could be damaging. Nor do we have any practical way of checking what that person eats. We are required to reject flames if we consider them harassing, but we do not accept responsibility for telling libel from non-libel. We also add the following header fields to each article: X-SCRM-Policy: http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/usenet/scrm/index.html X-SCRM-Info-1: Send submissions to scrm@algebra.com X-SCRM-Info-2: Send technical complaints to scrm-admin@algebra.com X-SCRM-Info-3: Send complaints about policy to scrm-board@algebra.com X-Comment: moderators do not necessarily agree or disagree with this article. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ X-Robomod-Version: STUMP 1.1, by ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov)
4) "Qui custodiet ipsos custodes." When I first saw that thread title, I thought it pertained to the moderation proposal. It could. That's why I'd like to see the rejected messages archived, at least for a while, as they are with Chudov's STUMP. What I'd like best, since I don't particularly want to waste bandwidth or my disk space with what would, by definition, be mostly crap, is a hks.lists.cypherpunks.flames on the open nntp port I'm using to read cypherpunks today. As some of you have noticed, I'm not on the list now, because most of it is junk; I just point Netscape at HKS Inc's open port whenever the whim strikes me, and grab the few messages that look interesting. I'd like to do the same with the "flame" list, every couple days. Of course, HKS and the other public archives would make that decsion, and I thank them for the free service they've provided me so far.
STUMP also regularly (once a week if so instructed) creates really pretty WWW archives of rejected articles, like this: http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/usenet/scrm/archive/maillist.html (see also http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/usenet/scrm/index.html) - Igor.