Re: Sandy and I will run a cypherpunks "moderation" experiment in Jan

[ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)]

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.