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

[Pierre Uszynski <pierre@rahul.net>]

Rich Graves <rcgraves@disposable.com> very correctly mentions:

> 1) Moderator liability and anonymous posting.

I agree that this is actually a critical problem with a filtering
moderation scheme. Such a scheme appears to provide the capability to
filter out possible "copyright violations" posts. From what I remember
of the Netcom/CoS case (without going back to the sources), that may
mean more liability for the reviewers (and the operator of the
machine). That's a major point against simple filtering moderation.
(Which is considered principally because that's way that's most
compatible with current mail readers, really.)

ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) responded:

> [in another forum]
> 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
> [and more in the same line 2,3,4,5]

Would any of this have mattered in Netcom/CoS?

Instead, a system that would forward reviewers' opinions *after the
fact* does not have any of this problem. And we have already mentioned,
it is also more powerful (real time initial feed, easy multiple
feedback feeds, fully compatible with anything else...) although it
does not reduce bandwidth requirements.

Pierre.
pierre@rahul.net