Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!lll-winken!unixhub!shelby!neon!Neon!jmc From: jmc@Gang-of-Four.usenet (John McCarthy) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk Subject: Re: Censorship on the USENET Message-ID: Date: 21 Oct 90 18:56:43 GMT References: <21282@well.sf.ca.us> Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System) Distribution: comp Organization: /u/jmc/.organization Lines: 17 In-Reply-To: mnemonic@well.sf.ca.us's message of 21 Oct 90 15:07:08 GMT The cost saving in suppressing a particular newsgroup are trivial. At Stanford they were probably negative, since personnel time went into it. We won the restoration by the following means: 1. There were faculty and student petitions on the subject, mostly from computer science people. 2. There was only one strong-minded bad guy and he was rather perfunctory in his "off with its head" decree. 3. The Academic Senate Steering Committee was persuaded to refer the issue to the faculty committee on libraries. This committee came up with a statement to the effect that the policy of an electronic library should be the same as that of a print library - universality tempered only by cost.