Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!att!chinet!patrick
From: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Obligations (Re: Freedom of hate)
Message-ID: <8196@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 11 Apr 89 06:26:22 GMT
References: <14130@gryphon.COM> <8132@chinet.chi.il.us> <8154@chinet.chi.il.us> <3763@ficc.uu.net> <8176@chinet.chi.il.us> <2575@splut.UUCP>
Reply-To: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 197

In article <2575@splut.UUCP> jay@splut.UUCP (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard) writes:
     
>No argument here, although I'm surprised that you've quit yelling
>"CENSORSHIP!!" about the concept...

It is not censorship when a private individual or institution with a 
computer chooses what will and will not be on the computer, using any
arbitrary and irrational decisions he wishes. Private property is 
private property.

It is censorship when the government offers some accomodation to everyone
similarly situated and then revokes that accomodation merely because of
some speech made.

It is unconstitutional for the government to censor. On the other hand it
is perfectly within the rights of private organizations to accomodate the
speech of others or not as they please.

Can you understand the difference between a computer facility operated by
the state, as in 'state university' versus the computer owned by a private
company, for example?

Somehow you have managed to confuse not only censorship by the government
versus actions by private parties but you have also tried to claim that
breach of a contract, verbal or written, is the same as censorship (as in
your exhortation to me to quit screaming about 'censorship'. Let's not
confuse all these issues. Let's talk about one of them at a time, shall we?

>What messages are there, yes. There's nothing that says I have to waste
>disk space on any posting on this net, though, and if I make that
>decision before the news gets batched, sorry...

Yes there is. What there is that says 'you have to waste disk space on
any posting on this net' is the verbal or other agreement you have with
some other site to make the postings available to them. And if you 'make
that decision before the news gets batched' then you are playing games,
pure and simple.

>Personally, I'm not interested that much. I do respect someone else's
>right to be, though.

Obviously you do not have a great deal of respect for the rights of the
other sites connected to you or you would not screw up their traffic.

>>But what we pass between each other other, using the other's site as a 
>>gateway must be intact. Would you like writing a message, fully expecting
>>it to be seen everywhere only to have the first guy down the line who
>>polled you every day look at it and decide to zap yours and pass along the
>>rest?
>
>Another good reason for redundant newsfeeds. Any message that I send is
>broadcast to five sites, and hence is less susceptible to being deleted
>completely when a sysadmin decides that that message doesn't belong on
>his system.

Must newsfeeds, all x-jillion bytes of them, be redundant because you like
to play games? Wasn't one purpose of Usenet to aide in keeping communication
costs at a minimum? The backbone must really be enamored of you; what do
they do, send the whole feed to five times as many places just to make sure
it actually gets all the way around? Talk about a need for policy, if there
ever was one, this is it. 

>>If you are really, truly saying you feel it is perfectly okay to zap any
>>messages you personally don't like while passing the rest of it along, then
>>I sure would hate to be a site downstream from you, trusting you for a full
>>feed every day!
>
>I would have no objections to such a use of the sysadmin's power; after
>all, it's his system. If I got unhappy enough, I'd find another feed,
>but I would NOT try to coerce him into using his computer and his phone
>bill to carry something he didn't want.

Oh, that's real cute. Would you try to 'coerce' anyone into doing anything?
And while the machine is the property of the sysadmin or his employer, the
sysadmin *has*, by agreeing to poll others and feed news, etc, come to
an understanding with those sites; one that while perhaos is not legally
enforceable, there being no such legal entity as 'Usenet' should certainly
be ethically and morally enforceable; that is if you have any ethics and/or
morals in the matter.

>>Do as you wish with the feed you offer your users, but don't you DARE tamper
>>with what is entrusted to you to pass to the backbone, or from the backbone
>>to some other site.
>
>If I trust someone that far, then I deserve to get burned. It's HIS
>system. Not mine. Not yours. His. Nothing in this world says that he has
>to support me. He's doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

But he has agreed to handle your traffic, therefore he should handle it
correctly. And you should be able to 'trust someone that far', because that
is what Usenet is about: the mutual sharing of news between sites. And let
us not get into whose system it is again. We all know who owns the system.
It is private property, and I hope you will not offer me a rebuttal which
consists of commentary about censorship and such. Any site -- private or
government -- which has agreed to participate in Usenet is under an ethical
and moral obligation to participate as participation has always been
defined, until the definition gets changed. 

And before you tell me that there is no breach of contract since no contract
can exist without some money or other valuable consideration changing hands
stop and think about the benefits to you from reading news passed along by
other sites. There is your consideration, for legal purposes in expecting a
contract to be followed. So when you delete all the items from the news which
personally offend you, you are shortchanging the sites which follow, and
violating the implied agreement you have with the person who paid the phone
bill to give you the feed.

>>Do you presently poll other sites, or feed news to other sites now? I think
>>I will find out, and sent their sysadmins a note telling them you feel no
>>obligation to play with a full deck of cards when they hand you their
>>traffic every day.
>
>Don't bother sending me that note; I'll blatantly ignore it.
>I'll save you some trouble, though: if you'd like, pass it along, and
>I'll post it to houston.general.

From what you have said above, how could you be trusted to pass it along?
There are plenty of ways to reach houston.general, I suppose, without
sending it through a site which only passes 'all the news that fits (into
their philosophical framework)'.

>>Tell me this: do you at least have the courtesy to tell the sites on 
>>either side of you that you have zapped the stuff you did not want to pass
>>along, or do you just send it minus a message here and there and assume
>>with the heavy volume they won't know the difference?
>
>Who gives a fuzzy rat's posterior? If he doesn't want it on his system,
>there's nothing I can do to make him pass it along. It's HIS system.

Well that is easy to answer: the originating authors care and the end 
readers care. Anyone who appreciates and respects the concept of Usenet
cares. You are right that as Usenet is now structured, there is probably
nothing legally you can do to force the issue. And your emphasis on the
word 'his' demonstrates you are still confusing property rights with
contractual obligations and moral/ethical obligations.

>>I would really hate to be a site dependent on moving traffic through you.
>>How would I know any of it got anywhere, if you were on some kind of a
>>tangent the day a user on my site happened to post a message you took a
>>dislike to.
>
>I have depended on moving traffic through his system; if he didn't like
>what I said, and felt strongly enough about it to remove it from his
>system, then there's not a whole lot I can do about it.

Read earlier paragraphs. The best you can hope for at this time is to 
convince him to behave in an ethical and moral way toward the other
participants in the net. Someday perhaps, when enough people get tired
of petty tyrants who want all the news while picking and choosing what
portion of it their neighbors should receive, a formal policy will be
developed which provides for disconnection of offenders. For all the
bureaucracy present in FIDONET, at least they have a very effective way
of dealing with what they term 'annoying behavior' by a site: the offender
is pulled out of the address matrix, and that is the end of their inbound
traffic, period.

>>I think if you are presently feeding anyone you ought to resign, and ask
>>them to find a feed elsewhere considering your attitude about the system.
   
>That would disqualify a LOT of sysadmins, who aren't willing to give up
>control of their system to some self-appointed protector of a
>non-existent right to free speech on the net.

Here we go again with your free speech nonsense. 'Free speech' is only
applicable to *state*; i.e. Verity's State University, sites; and then,
only when the speech was the reason for the exclusion.

I don't think it would disqualify a LOT of sysadmins; mainly because I do
not think there are very many like whoose-it, the subject of this string,
who take in feeds and wilfully tamper with them. Certainly there are 
sysadmins who do not carry full feeds, or do not carry certain groups,
but that is okay; they don't *claim* to carry them while only carrying
the parts that meet their approval and deleting the rest. At least not if
they assume a role in handling the traffic of neighboring sites.

>>No one is telling you to allow stuff to stay in your machine you disagee
>>with, but how could you even think of screwing up someone else's traffic
>>in the process?  Shame on you.
   
>It's his right. It's his system.

It is his system and whatever agreements he makes with his users are valid.
Likewise, whatever implied agreements he makes with other sites have to 
be honored. That is called a 'contract', and it has nothing to do with
free speech.

To the other readers of this post: this is just one more example of why
the beloved anarchy style of running Usenet is also the reason so many
unpopular things have happened on the net in recent years. It is hardly
what would be termed 'the death of Usenet', but if some of the real old
timers around here even recognize this thing five years from now, I would
be quite surprised. 

-- 
Patrick Townson 
  patrick@chinet.chi.il.us / ptownson@bu-cs.bu.edu / US Mail: 60690-1570 
  FIDO: 115/743 / AT&T Mail: 529-6378 (!ptownson) /  MCI Mail: 222-4956