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From: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,news.admin,news.sysadmin,soc.women
Subject: Re: Hazards of legal myths and legends
Message-ID: <1324@desint.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Oct-87 03:20:11 EST
Article-I.D.: desint.1324
Posted: Fri Oct 23 03:20:11 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 15:51:27 EST
References: <2135@kitty.UUCP>
Reply-To: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Distribution: na
Organization: Interrupt Technology Corp., Manhattan Beach, CA
Lines: 57
Xref: mnetor misc.legal:3273 news.admin:1233 news.sysadmin:423 soc.women:7956

In article <2135@kitty.UUCP> larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) writes
his latest attack on Mark Ethan Smith, and insists on dragging the
news system administrators into it.

Larry:

(1) Usenet does not need you to protect it from Mark.  In fact, Usenet
    does not need to be protected from him by anyone, since he's harmless.
(2) If you've been on the net as long as you claim, surely you
    recall the incident a couple of years ago on The Source's "Parti"
    system, in which a healthy male masqueraded as a (heroic) paraplegic
    female.  If so, you will also no doubt recall that no legal action
    was taken against the perpetrator, and that it is difficult to
    quantify any actual long-term harm to anyone from the incident.
    Nothing that I have seen from Mark has been even vaguely that deceptive.
(3) It is probably true that Mark has made some incorrect and
    even intentionally misleading statements at times.  Big hairy deal.
    In the first place he is frequently angry, and angry people often
    overstate their case, even if it was completely defensible when
    understaed.  In the second place, people have a perfect right to lie and
    mislead on the net, just as they do elsewhere.  Just as one example,
    some of us remember a recent graduate of Mark's school who called
    himself "Rocky Raccoon".
(4) It appears that you have a very strong desire to nullify Mark's postings
    to the net.  You have variously tried to have him kicked off, threatened
    legal action, made him out as a major liar, and most recently, having
    taken the trouble to research a legal case, have posted a thinly-disguised
    attempt to get system administrators to punish him because of
    alleged misrepresentation of legal data (how unusual;  surely in all
    the time I've been on the net Mark's the only one who shot off his
    mouth about a legal matter without a law degree :-).
(5) I, and from the traffic most of the other system administrators on the
    net agree with me, am not even vaguely interested in your attempts to
    suppress Mark.  He has as much right to be on the net as you do.  If
    (as you allege, and I do not believe based on the evidence) he lies,
    misquotes, misleads, or does other unsavory things, that's ABSOLUTELY
    FINE with us.  He can do all of those things in a handbill or a letter
    to the editor or (sans obscenity) a radio call-in show, and I see
    no reason why he should be denied the right to be wrong on the net
    too.  It's called free speech;  it used to be popular in New York.
    (Like Rick Redfern, I could send you some literature... :-)

In other words, Larry, carry out your feud all you want, but keep it out
of news.sysadmin.  Silencing Mark, or anyone else, is not administratively
appropriate.  If you can come up with something actionable in court, best
of luck in that venue, but it's not our job to censor people.

P.S.  It was a very poor decision to omit soc.women from your latest attack.
I will assume it was out of a genuine desire to reduce traffic unrelated
to that group, but given that soc.women is where your feud arose, it
would have been better to either cross-post there, or to send a copy
directly to Mark so he could know the accusations against him.  Omitting
soc.women gives the impression that you are trying to sneak around behind
Mark's back and get people to gang up on him, something that I presume
you wouldn't stoop to.
-- 
	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@ITcorp.com   {uunet,trwrb}!desint!geoff