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From: jeff@gatech.UUCP (Jeff Lee)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Moderators
Message-ID: <11765@gatech.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Jan-85 13:14:01 EST
Article-I.D.: gatech.11765
Posted: Fri Jan 25 13:14:01 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Jan-85 07:40:32 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: School of ICS, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Lines: 29

Pretending, for a moment, that we have stargate up and running, someone is
paying for it, and all the newsgroups are moderated to protect the carriers,
what is to prevent the moderators from being sued for something that they
thought was OK, but actually wasn't (in some lawyers eyes) ??  If the
newsgroups are moderated, there is a person for people to look to that is
"responsible" for what goes out, ie -- "don't look at us, man; we are just
the carrier".

When I think of moderators, editors, and other such "preprocessors" that must
go over things to protect the innocent, I am reminded of an incident that
occurred in my high school literary magazine during my senior year. The
magazine requested work from the students, all the editors went over the
submitted material, and it was sent in and the finished magazines were
returned and sold to try to cover the cost of publishing. One girl took a
copy that she had purchased home and her mother wanted to read it. The mother
remarked that she had seen this one poem before and sure enough, in one of
her old textbooks she had the poem. The school went crazy for a while hoping
that they didn't get sued and the girl was punished (I don't recall how).
The fact is, after 5-6 editors and several english teachers went over the
material, some no-no material STILL got published. Is there a precedent for
something like this in the law books, and would it extend to electronic
publication? Notice that this and libelous information are still subject
to prosecution even though they may be in a subscription-type format.

	Just a thought,
-- 
Jeff Lee
CSNet:	Jeff @ GATech		ARPA:	Jeff.GATech @ CSNet-Relay
uucp:	...!{akgua,allegra,rlgvax,sb1,unmvax,ulysses,ut-sally}!gatech!jeff