webber@constance.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) (05/06/88)
In article <70@dcs.UUCP>, wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul) writes: >... > Further, while there may be freedom of speech, USENET also involves the > privilege of using other people's material resources for free, and anytime > you use somebody elses resources in the exercise of your rights, the owner >of those resources acquires some degree of control over your exercise of these >rights. That's because under our consitution, there are rights associated with > private property. > >And just in case someone thinks that then we need to abolish private property, >I'd advise you to study the degree of freedom(of speech and otherwise)in those >countries where they tried that. I'd rather be constrained by other people's >property rights than by an almighty state which grants noone any rights. While you are correct that Usenet involves the use of property and hence its customs legally are doubtless controlled by property rights, this is not a good base for grounding Usenet behavior. The reason is quite simply that historically (and even today) a very large number of Usenet news operations are run in complete ignorance of the property owners. I.e., the people that actually pay the bills are quite often completely unaware of the nature that their employees, etc., put the communication equipement attached to the computers to (for that matter, historically the use of computers for things other than what the money that pays for them was budgetted for has been a major ethical problem in the computer profession). Although usually the news site administrator is someone to whom general authority has been delegated, while their usage of it for news is hopefully justified in their own eyes, they usually present an image of doing things that they don't think their ultimate bosses would allow them to continue if the matter ever came to the attention of the people fondly referred to as ``the beancounters'' (which is different from saying that they would view the news site administrator as not having the authority to have set the thing up in the first play). Thus, although there are many sites where Usenet is under the direct view of the people who actually pay the bills on it, this is not the general rule. Thus neither the legal standing of free speech nor that of property rights is very relevant to Usenet custom, since ultimately much of Usenet consists of people very aggressively bending rules (and doubtless often breaking some) to get something they think justifies the risk. Thus the question is really which of these rights rests firmest in the hearts and minds of Usenet folk. Traditionally, although computer people tend to be members of the propertied class, they were also highly educated and tended to be working on things that made them reliant on other people's money (i.e., if they made $50k a year but the equipment that they personally view as necessary for their lifestyle costs a million dollars (including support staffs, software contracts, etc.), then their views of property rights relative to Usenet are going to be similar to someone making $5k a year and reliant upon welfare view of property rights relative to rent. Put another way, free speech rights are much more concrete for a classic Usenet person than property rights due to a higher than usual interest in the written word and very low income vis a vis what they view as useful property (even now-a-days, the vast majority of Usenet readers do not view themselves as being able to afford to own a functioning leaf node of Usenet). The allusion to poor performance of socialist countries is irrelevant because although they decrease individual property rights, they remain property-focussed societies, whereas Usenet is ultimately an information- focussed society where the very definition of information property is a very slippery concept with very little tradition that seems relevant to the current circumstances whereas informational access rights traditions in this country seem to have a clearer and more direct relevance to current circumstances. The foundation for the custom of it being bad form to abuse Usenet resources does not rest in property rights, but rather in the notion of ``honour among thieves.'' Many of the current problems with Usenet society rest in an aggrevation of its schizophrenic view of whether or not it has a legal right to exist coupled with the vast variance in the awareness of it by the people who ultimately pay the bills for it at the different sites and the varying relations of the Usenet users at different sites have with those bill payers and the great lack of real hard data about just how many sites with what connectivity fall into what categories (if that isn't a long enough list, throw in the change in the status of Unix which has significantly impacted the notion of a typical Unix user and hence the typical Usenet reader (while Usenet is clearly available on non-Unix boxes, I do not think (but hardly know) that Usenet has become independent of Unix society)). ------ BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)