Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: In Moderation: A Moderator's Response Message-ID: <3305@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 12 Jun 89 17:56:51 GMT References: <41197@bbn.COM> <12113@well.UUCP> <41207@bbn.COM> <632@biar.UUCP> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 53 In article <632@biar.UUCP> jhood@biar.UUCP (John Hood) writes: >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 ;-) Whoops. Not quite. Didn't someone from a small company in Florida post recently saying he has some of the folks he's feeding help out with his uunet bill? Looks like he can't do that either. >Of course, there's the old trusty standby, see below. This, I just >realized, runs into problems in Europe though. Are the net hubs there >run as non-profit organizations? Does such a concept even apply >beyond US borders? The concept may or may not apply, case by case. Just as in the US, there are academic as well as commercial sites on the net in Europe. I claim that any restriction you add to your posting that will be automatically violated by the act of posting your article is invalid. For example, let's say I dislike the "portal" system (at one point, this was true; they've become much better net citizens lately, though). Let's say I post articles with the .signature: "I forbid anyone from transmitting this article to the Portal Communications Company". This is nonsense -- the net broadcasts using a flooding algorithm, and there is simply no mechanism to stop my article. The act of posting the article guarantees that the restriction will be violated. Now let's look at the .signature John Gilmore and others came up with -- "You may transmit this article only if your recipients may." I contend that this restriction IS valid because it is easily complied with, in either of two ways: 1) I can ignore it. In this case, anyone who receives this article has the right to pass it on, regardless of any other agreements between feeder and feedee. 2) I can filter such articles out. But if for some reason, I miss a few, no problem -- it's just that any recipients now have a right to send the article as well. I have no problem if someone wants to hire Geoff Goodfellow as their editor, and I have no problem if someone wants to sign up for Brad Templeton's service either. These efforts to attempt to stop innovation with legal restrictions seem to me to be the kind of thing that folks that believe in freedom should be against. The reason we're seeing a lot of proposals like Geoff's and Brad's at this time is because there's a demand for it. The net has simply become too large. A better response to these proposals is to come up with competing proposals that would be free. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck