M. Fioretti wrote:
(*) yes, the moderators, that is listmasters or whatever you want to
call them. I have read your objection that this is a not moderated
list, but it is irrelevant. My proposal was to ban outright your email
or IP addresses, not to hold and check each single email sent to the
list by anybody.
There's a legal issue here that nobody's mentioned.
At least in the US, there is a growing body of law and precedent that
says, essentially:
- if you provide a list, but don't moderate traffic, you're not legally
liable for things like slander, libel, copyright infringement, child
pornography, etc.
- as soon as you do ANY moderation, you now open yourself up to a legal
challenges on many fronts, both civil and criminal, for messages that
might be actionable
It's the difference between being and ISP and an editor. Your legal
position and liabilities change depending on how you manage a list.
So... when you start proposing that somebody assume a lot of potential
legal liabilities. Somehow, I don't think that either the individuals
administering this list, nor whatever organization actually "owns"
lists.debian.org, is prepared to step up to that kind of exposure.
Worse, if they were prepared to do so, they might then feel compelled to
be overly cautions in their moderation, lest they be taken to court by:
- governments, under hate crime and/or child pornography laws (oops,
that signature line might be illegal in France)
- the MPAA or RIAA (gee, that post about <program x> aids and abets piracy)
- large software companies (that post violates our patents or copyrights)
Personally, as someone who provides list services for several dozen
non-profits and community organizations, that's the kind of exposure I
try to avoid like the plague. Somehow, I don't see the listmasters at
debian.org as being ready to step up to the kind of moderation that
folks like AOL apply to their forums.
Miles
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