Re: [Bug-gne]the problem of illegal content vs. freedom

[Christopher Mahan]

I don't feel guilty for other people's crimes. A criminal can always find a 
way to kill someone. Either with their Chevy Suburban, the bottle ot 
Tylenol, the Gensu Knife, the Smith&Wesson revolver, the Black&Decker drill, 
the arsenic, the Sears Hammer, the golf club, the baseball bat, the... I 
could go on...

Should we ban all these products? Of course not. Likewise we should not ban 
any information.

Should we put these people behind bars? Of course! And I don't mean train 
them as bartenders.

I am all for justice and punishment of criminals. I am not, however, for the 
censorship of information that the current majority might find distasteful. 
Lots of regimes have tried that. Usually, these rulers ended up with their 
heads in a basket, or lined up against the wall and mowed down, or hung 
upside down, or with a bullet in their head in a bunker outside Berlin in 
May 1945 (I don't know how to make it more plain).

I think it might be good in a way to have reviews from readers on the 
appropriateness of contents, purely to see where the sensibilities of a 
country, region, ethnic group, or what, stand. This could be given a 
feedback to authors who then could either ignore it, or evaluate some of the 
comments and make modifications at their discretions.

The idea behind that is that the author might have inadvertently included 
something in the article that is offensive to a group, and, not wishing to 
offend anyone on a particular article, modify it.

As far as ranking authors, that's ludicrous. It's censorship based on 
character, not content. That's even worse than editorialism. It's like 
saying: Anything from the White House is good, but anything from the 
Anti-Defamation Leage is rubbish.

We could quite simply require posters of "less-than-tasteful" photographs to 
arrange for the links to be posted on their own server. The article itself 
would not contain it, and if legal liabilities were to arise, it would be 
easier to point to the guilty party. If the link was broken, the article 
would still stand, and the ALT tag would read "Photograph of something XXX".

Chris




> From: Oliver Denzel <address@hidden>
>
> Hi All!
>
> I personally would feel guilty if I would have helped(by writing
> software) someone to murder. This is I think a point of ethics where you
> have to balance things. I feel very bad about the situation right now,
> because we are getting towards a direction where articles about
> pedophilia would be allowed, but if it contains commercial content it's
> a big no-no. I have far less problems with children seeing a commercial
> ad, than seeing explicit pictures of an old man f**ing a child that's as
> old as him/her.
>
> The only way to solve this is to have a big pool of reviewers, which
> would help to get the bias out of way. It would be possible to get
> everybody who views an article to say if it was useful for him or not.
> That would be a first point of review, because if an article gets 100
> reviews which all tell that it is rubbish or even worse, people would
> focus on articles which have a better rating. And most of the people
> would rate thing as an article with pcitures of pedophilia very low.
>
> Another point would be to have a system where every user can also do an
> "in deep" review where he rates stuff like legal issues, suitability for
> children, and so on. If we like to advance on this topic, it would even
> be possible to give weights to the reviews, which means, if somebody
> writes articles with good ratings, he writes sensible stuff. So his
> ratings of other articles can be considered as sensible. Perhaps only on
> the same topic.
>
> That's all.
>
> Oli D.
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com