On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 04:10 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:

...

You're missing my general point. If you prefer that I not use "religion," I could just as easily use an example where certainly people of some community think that some otherwise-constitutional practice is "harmful."

True. Yet harm gives you cause for Common Law action, no?

No, not generally, not in the U.S. The lawyerpunks and lawyer larvae can explain in more detail, but a tort (civil action, not a criminal action) must have some element of either rights violation or breaking of a contract. A wall that falls over onto someone's property generates a possible tort, the failure to deliver a product according to a contract also does. But the fact that I claim I am "harmed" by Mormons in my midst does not. (Nor does an actual case of economic harm: if a bookstore is driven out of business by the arrival of a supergiant chain store, it will not win a tort case, generally speaking. This is because there is no "right to face no competition" and there was no non-compete contract. The little bookstore may try to argue that the large chain is in violation of some anti-bigness law, and many have, but this is somewhat different. And the small stores have not yet been successful in blocking the larger stores.)

It's a question of where you draw the line between coerced and uncoerced. If many enough of your peers think it's good behavior to label your communications, and failure to do so leads to an amount of badwill, does that constitute coercion?

In English, "coercion" means by use of force. If your friends think you should do something, and you comply, this is not coercion in the sense implied here. (This may be "social coercion," but we mean something more specific.) Coercion means men with guns threatening people with imprisonment for displaying certain images, for example. Coercion is when Congress passes the Protection of the Children Act of 2002 and requires all ISPs to provide content-filtering labels and tools. This is the direction "content labelling" is going, not the voluntary system ALREADY IN PLACE. --Tim May