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From: dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: In Moderation: A Moderator's Response
Summary: The U.S. is merely a special case
Message-ID: <2258@drilex.UUCP>
Date: 20 Jun 89 14:20:19 GMT
References: <41197@bbn.COM> <12113@well.UUCP> <41207@bbn.COM> <Jun.10.18.52.35.1989.6219@topaz.rutgers.edu> <632@biar.UUCP> <2213@qiclab.UUCP>
Reply-To: dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1)
Organization: DRI/McGraw-Hill, Lexington, MA
Lines: 64

In article <2213@qiclab.UUCP> leonard@qiclab.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) writes:
>In article <632@biar.UUCP> jhood@biar.UUCP (John Hood) writes:
><In article <Jun.10.18.52.35.1989.6219@topaz.rutgers.edu> msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu (Mark Robert Smith) writes:
><>***You may only charge a fee to redistribute this article if you are 
><>***UUNET Communications Services.
><
><Another way to get the intended effect would be to say "only
><non-profit organizations may charge".  This would more generally
><discriminate between those who would use Usenet to profit-minded ends
><and the Rest Of Us ;-)
>
>Sorry, but "non-profit organization" != "organization that doesn't make
>a profit". "Non-profit organization" has a very specific legal meaning
>that is quite different from what you have in mind. And I rather doubt
>that more than a small fraction of the sites on the net are *legally*
>non-profit. And odds are that they aren't the ones charging for access.

>Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard

Don't forget also that the precise meaning of non-profit is something that
is defined by the tax codes of the various political entities in the U.S.A.
I'm sure that they don't even agree 100% (maybe 99% though).  When your
message crosses a country boundary, though, you may have any definition
applied.


BTW, has anybody given serious thought to the various implementation
alternatives that In Moderation Network has available to it?  Everybody
assumes that it would take the form of a trimmed-down newsfeed, because
that would make the most sense.  However, in the face of various
knee-jerk reactions, it could be handled in several other ways:

1. You could get your feed from anywhere, and transmit it anywhere.
In Moderation Network would supply you with a list of cruft article IDs;
this list would be copyrighted, of course.  IMN would also supply a program
which would take the article IDs and mark a given newsreader's .newsrc
so they would not be read.  In the extreme case, this could give IMN
a good reason to charge on a per-reader basis.

2. You could get your feed from anywhere, and transmit it anywhere.
In Moderation Network would supply you with a feed of cancel messages.
Each of these would be frobbed up to ensure that they will be accepted
by your news software, and each would carry a distribution which would
ensure that the cancel messages themselves would not get out of your
organization.  IMN could if necessary supply patches to the news transport
software to ensure this.  Of course, these cancel messages would also
carry a copyright, in addition to being covered by IMN's contract.

This one has the advantage that it only wastes transmission time; most likely,
the articles would not spend much time in your spool directory, and
quite likely would be removed before they were batched for downstream
transmission.  But a sysadmin has the right to do a local cancel, doesn't
he?

In any case, neither of these two alternatives would seem to be affected
by any signature phrase imaginable.

(Thanks to Brad Templeton at the Usenix Usenet BOF for getting me thinking
on these lines.  Geoff Goodfellow is free to implement these ideas; I'd
appreciate a thank-you note if he does.  If he has thought of them 
independently, then I congratulate him.)
-- 
Craig Jackson
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