dik@turing.UUCP (04/16/85)
Well, the true reason Europe cut off net.politics (together with net.misc
and net.jokes) was high volume, low contents. However, just before
Europe left these newsgroups I stumbled across a quote from a Don Black.
At first I did not believe my eyes, so I grepped through all articles in
our spool directory for the text 'Black', and true enough, a number of
articles appeared. Reading through them I can only say that I am happy
we do not receive it anymore, although my opinion was at first that I
would have been glad had net.politics remained. Now, however, I was
quite disgusted to see what some of you 'cross-atlanteans see fit to
post to the net.
The problem is however not only my disgust, but there is also a legal
problem here. The discussion started with the conviction of a man in
Canada on the charge of inciting hatred to minority groups or something
like that (I can not reread it as we removed the newsgroup here).
The discussion started first about freedom of speech and things like
that but later Spence and Black threw in there 2 cents worth of speech
(that would even be too much), and in their articles they included
things that might fall under that same law. Now speech like that
is not only not permitted in Canada, but also in many European
countries. But not only uttering is subject to punishment, but also
publishing and distributing, where a plea of not-guilty on the ground that
the contents of the stuff distributed was unknown might or might not be
honoured by a judge. (The same holds in many countries for pornography,
not an unsuitable comparison, as the utterances of Spencer and Black
might very well be termed political pornography.)
So this leaves our site (and probably many other sites) in Europe in a
legal tangle. We distribute news in good faith that nothing that might
lead to legal harrasment will be distributed, but if this faith is not
justified it is clear that we have to cut off those newsgroups.
Furthermore, we transport news across borders, so we have also to deal
with international law. I do not think our site is up to that kind of
things.
So you 'cross-atlanteans, think first before you post articles to the
net that might not only be offensive to a particular person, but might
also be offensive to a whole group of people.
Leaving net.politics in disgust, and voting now for moderated newsgroups.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
UUCP: {seismo|decvax|philabs}!mcvax!dik