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*sigh* oh internet;
Aug. 6th, 2007 01:19 amI go away for two weeks, and look what happens. Racewank, gaywank, and now 6a is being a drama llama. My whole feelings pretty match Izzas’ on this one but let me just go into something here on the legality bit:
Okay, the whole “we don’t want to get sued!!!!!112” bit is stale. Now pretty much any lawyer interested in the net, and many a privacy-rights nut will tell you; it’s damn near impossible to get sued as the owner of a message board.
Why you ask? Simple. Waaaay back in the wee hours of the net, back when Zdtv was Zdtv, and not Techtv or that abomination that is the G4-whatever, there was a lawsuit about something like this. Now since this was back when rocks were soft and DSL was just something that rich kids had to play with, my memory is a little fuzzy on this, but for the most part the lawsuit goes something like this.
Someone, somewhere got hurt, doesn’t matter how or if it was physical or mental. The point is that either the person had gotten the info on how to do it off of a message board, or the hate speech was on there and the victim took an understandable issue with it. Again, hazy here; the important thing is that the victim had tried to sue the maintainer of the forum/site for allowing the stuff to be up there in the first place.
Putting it bluntly, he lost, big fucking time. The one thing I can remember clearly is the reasoning given.
So okay, let’s use the wall analogy. Lets say you have this wall on your land, lets say that you also don’t mind that people spray paint all over it, I donno, perhaps you like the way it looks. Now imagine some jackoff goes up to the wall and sprays some racist symbol on there or shit. Is it your fault that the prig did that? No, if the police come around you point them at the asshole who did it and go back to look at your nice wall and either paint over the symbol or let some other person spray over it. Perhaps you even leave it up with your comment below like, “don’t be a douche and put shit like this up”. Similar case, what if one tagger gets pissed off and beats the ever-living-crap out of someone else on your wall. Does the victim have the right to sue you over the fact that he was pinned against your wall when he got his ribs broken? Hell no, what the fuck did the wall ever do to him; the courts would throw that argument out in a second.
It’s pretty much the same damn thing with message boards and websites you can post on. If you post something illegal, yeah you can get sued, but not the maintainer, and not the hosting service either. So yeah, if SixApart is going to say things like, “we have our own rules, and we’re going to be hypocrites and ban one kind of obscenity but not another.” Then yeah, they can do that. They have a legal right to be assholes, it’s the same reason why matchmaker.com can get away with denying same-sex matchups. But if they’re going to try to hide behind the law like that, then they’re nothing but chicken-shits.
Okay, the whole “we don’t want to get sued!!!!!112” bit is stale. Now pretty much any lawyer interested in the net, and many a privacy-rights nut will tell you; it’s damn near impossible to get sued as the owner of a message board.
Why you ask? Simple. Waaaay back in the wee hours of the net, back when Zdtv was Zdtv, and not Techtv or that abomination that is the G4-whatever, there was a lawsuit about something like this. Now since this was back when rocks were soft and DSL was just something that rich kids had to play with, my memory is a little fuzzy on this, but for the most part the lawsuit goes something like this.
Someone, somewhere got hurt, doesn’t matter how or if it was physical or mental. The point is that either the person had gotten the info on how to do it off of a message board, or the hate speech was on there and the victim took an understandable issue with it. Again, hazy here; the important thing is that the victim had tried to sue the maintainer of the forum/site for allowing the stuff to be up there in the first place.
Putting it bluntly, he lost, big fucking time. The one thing I can remember clearly is the reasoning given.
So okay, let’s use the wall analogy. Lets say you have this wall on your land, lets say that you also don’t mind that people spray paint all over it, I donno, perhaps you like the way it looks. Now imagine some jackoff goes up to the wall and sprays some racist symbol on there or shit. Is it your fault that the prig did that? No, if the police come around you point them at the asshole who did it and go back to look at your nice wall and either paint over the symbol or let some other person spray over it. Perhaps you even leave it up with your comment below like, “don’t be a douche and put shit like this up”. Similar case, what if one tagger gets pissed off and beats the ever-living-crap out of someone else on your wall. Does the victim have the right to sue you over the fact that he was pinned against your wall when he got his ribs broken? Hell no, what the fuck did the wall ever do to him; the courts would throw that argument out in a second.
It’s pretty much the same damn thing with message boards and websites you can post on. If you post something illegal, yeah you can get sued, but not the maintainer, and not the hosting service either. So yeah, if SixApart is going to say things like, “we have our own rules, and we’re going to be hypocrites and ban one kind of obscenity but not another.” Then yeah, they can do that. They have a legal right to be assholes, it’s the same reason why matchmaker.com can get away with denying same-sex matchups. But if they’re going to try to hide behind the law like that, then they’re nothing but chicken-shits.
