An aire of paranoia, perhaps?

["ROSSI J.A." <rossi@nusc.arpa>]

In response to Joe Buck:

I believe that you are a little paranoid in your assumptions concerning the
downfall of USENET due to libel or slander.  First of all your newspaper
analogy, although well articulated, is flawed.  First of all, in the case of
the newspaper, responsibility is assumed by the newspaper for anything
printed in it unless specifically disclaimed (e.g., The views of the
following are not necessarily those ...).  The newspaper, being an entity,
which is not arbitrarily defined accepts responsibility for what IT prints.
Now, in the case of USENET, the control over what gets entered is much more
loosely defined.  For matters of such things as software stealing, the
administrator of systems where the 'crimes' take place is assumed responsible.
In these cases one can not disclaim responsibility.  It is hard to imagine
a similar scenario involving personal matters.  For instance, suppose that
Sue T. wanted to bring action against USENET for remarks made by Tim W.  At
whom would she direct the action.  Certainly not at the host administrator
of some company who happens to receive information over the net.  Maybe it
can be directed at the net for allowing the information to be there?
I doubt it.  Maybe at the manufacturer of the communication system which
allows the information to be 'beamed' worldwide?  I believe that couched in
your comments is a little paranoid thinking.  I tend to be reasonably
suspicious of the motives of people who say that they don't mind 4 letter
words but that freedom of expression does have limits.  In this month's
Keyboard magazine, there was a letter of protest concerning Jim Atkins (Editor
of Kbd) editorial concerning the labeling of sensitive material contained in
album music (i.e., censorship).  The writer of the letter suggested that
he didn't mind those 4 letter words but that he would like to be able to
protect his childern from the likes of Motely Crue's 'God Bless the Childern
of the Beast'.  Well, upon reading this, I immediately ran to my 9 yr old's
record collection and pulled out a well played Theater of Pain and cued up
God Bless...  To my horror, what I found was a Motely Crue selection that
I could tollerate.  As a matter of fact I kind of liked it.  Unless there
were demonic messages superimposed in the harmonic structure of the thing,
this is the least offensive thing I'd heard since Vangelis.  The piece in
question (for those of you that do not know) is an instrumental which sounds
a little like the dual guitar solo's in the Eagles' 'Hotel California'.  
Well, I then regained my composure and went back to reading the Keyboard
letters, convinced that people will say anything which makes them sound
'Cool' in order to be persuasive about an opinion.  In the present case,
I believe that if there was a true verbal assult on Sue T.'s character (which
as has been repeated here many times by many of us who have become accustomed
to Tim's way of dealing with his world, including Sue?, is obviously not the
case), all responsibility for it is taken at the ARPA end, and finally by
the host administrator from where the comments emerged (as, unfortunately
is the case with Tim).  How anyone would hold USENET responsible for any
of the proceedings (except, of course for generating complaints which led
to a premature and untimely censoring of Wicinski) is hard to imagine.

John
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