Blogging talk:Blogger's Code of Conduct/Responsibility for our own words
From Blogging
[edit] "infringes upon a copyright or trademark"
This desperately needs a fair use caveat at least as strong as the blogher code contains. Mike Linksvayer 05:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- Put it in then. 11:35, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- At least within the US, no policy, contract, or TOS can supersede fair use rights. To mention that would simply be informative, not having any affect on the meaning. horsedreamer 16:41, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
- With all due respect, there is not only the US in the world. There are lots of countries, where the term "fair use" isn't even known. ProClub (bulk ad janoszen dot hu) 08:47, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog."
I don't we should be responsible with the comments posted on our blog. I myself have trolls, some do go to the extent of giving me death threats and will even call me via cellphone. But I still leave their comments on my blogs and let my readers judge the whole thing. I have comment moderation on mainly for combating comment-spams, but not to filter out my trolls and whatever comments they want to leave. So I really think that we as bloggers should only be responsible with what we are posting, not with what our "commenters" are posting. I can like ask a group of people to say bad things about another company by posting comments on various blogs. Sadly, this bloggers are for some reason, wasn't informed of the comments (they're sick, or new to blogging, or lost internet connection, etc. etc.), now the companies attacked can sue these blog owners for the comments posted on their blogs, just so because, on that time period, all bloggers automatically agrees to "1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog." Just my point, we really don't have 100% control over the comments, and many of us if not all prefer to leave comments from our readers "and trolls". Laibeus Lord
- You can do the responsibility thing in one of two ways: either you’re selective about publishing comments or you aren’t. (I’m not talking here about automation to suppress spam, but about schemes where you decide either before or after posting to remove or alter certain comments based on their content.) If you decide which ones get published and which don’t, like a letters-to-the-editor column, then you own them all -- not in the copyright sense, of course, but in the sense of legal responsibility for publication if they violate copyright, are libelous, etc. If you don’t, then you are just a common carrier of information, like a telco or an ISP, and the legal responsibility falls on the person who wrote them. That’s both the law in the U.S. (IANAL, TINLA) and common sense. --Johnwcowan 19:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- In Germany, court has said, that a forum moderator would be responsible for content posted. Therefore on german sites, moderators are responsible for comments, posts or whatever gets published on their websites by law. You can't disclaim responsibility for things on a website you own. At least not in a legal sense. Of course you can disclaim responsibility for bad ethics. I think letting site owners decide, if they want to moderate their comments is a good idea, but labeling the site is also a nice policy: http://www.icra.org/label/ ProClub (bulk at janoszen dot hu) 08:55, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] 1: Taking responsibility
Does declaring that you will take responsibility for copyright and trademark violations open you up to more legal exposure than you would have otherwise? Particularly given the vaguaries of international IP law? If so I think many bloggers might balk at this particular point. What if the violation is in a language you don't even understand?
--Sethop 06:04, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Concerning the "[We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]":
If you want this to be a shared set of standards that everyone signs up to and acknowledges with the badge, you've really got to have a very careful policy around how those standards are going to change! You might want to insist that everyone who uses the badge is signed up to an email list in which any agreed changes are posted to, just so that they know what standards they're agreeing to maintain.
If on the other hand you want everyone to be able to tweak their own set of standards then you really have to consider how you're going to communicate to casual users / commenters that the badge means different things in diferent places.
See below regarding Versioning and Variants
--Sethop 06:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- The "standards" in question here are simply the guidelines for what is considered acceptable as defined by the blogger, if I'm reading this correctly. Furthermore, the blogger promises to makes those guidelines clear in advance (and alert the public when (after?) s/he changes them. In that case, the badge doesn't mean different things on different sites, as the badge only signifies that the blogger is conforming to the policy on defining what is acceptable. Conclusion: 1) something like the following woudl be preferred: "We reserve the right to redefine these standards at any time without prior notice." 2) it would be best if an (easily tweakable) guideline template could be provided to bloggers. In this regard, the CC way of letting bloggers easily stipulate which copyright they will publsh under could be used as a guide. 87.118.108.246 00:18, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
I strongly agree with Sethop. There should be advance notices, or many bloggers will fall to future holes because they don't know something drastic has changed. Laibeus Lord
Well, this doesn't *necessarily* require advance notice -- really just after-the-fact notice. So in this sense, the statement would become "We reserve the right to change these standards at any time without advance notice." Then, if you want to put the badge on your site, you'd basically be required to be on a notification mailing list (so you could find out about changes). Ideally, changes would be published in advance, but if something must be fixed urgently, the notification could be essentially simultaneous with the change.
Something else that needs to be addressed (at some point down the line) is where these standards will be hosted. If this list is intended to be something that lives *solely* at bloggingcode.org, it'll have to be worded one way. If it's intended to be posted (in some fashion) on each blog that signs up to it, it would have to be worded differently. Maybe the approach used by Creative Commons for their licenses (when you get a badge, it comes with a license name / rev. number) is a good one to follow here as well?
--Sam Wise 18:20, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- I think the Creative Commons approach could work well here. Bloggers could take different parts of the code and form one of a number of Codes in the same way they can mix attribution/commercial use/share-alike with Creative Commons to get different licenses. Angela talk 19:18, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
- I agree with Sam Wise and Angela. the issue is that views and countries vary. Also how you want to handle your own blog varies. but the CC approach would kind of give us the flexibility.Flosse talk
- I think the consensus is heading towards the CC approach or nothing. I can also think of no Earthly way you can violate a patent in a blog post or in a comment, so I'm just going to take that word out now :-) I mean sure, you could expose what was in a currently unpublished patent application, which is naughty, but that's not the same as violating the patent. --Sethop 09:11, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Legal Assertions
I would recommend removing anything that implies that you are making an assertion about the legality of excluded content or coming to any legal conclusion about it (e.g. "libelous"). It's a distraction from the main point, and creates potential legal problems without adding anything.
[edit] violates an obligation of confidentiality
"violates an obligation of confidentiality" What about whistle-blowing? I think we need a blogger code of conduct, but this and the copyright/trademark one should be tossed or heavily re-edited. -hiaw.org
[edit] Privacy
Aren't violations of peoples' privacy often good journalism? If George Bush had an affair with a person not his wife, posting about it would certainly be a violation of his privacy. How do you draw that line? ~erik
There also seems to be a bit of a contradiction between Privacy and the stuff that deals with Anonymous posts? Especially when it comes to the discusssion about exploring technologies to expose the anonymous. - Steve Elbows
[edit] Respecting copyright
I believe there should be a rule for respecting copyright. For example, even on this wiki, when you want to post a change you are required to agree that "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"
By the way, I copied that quote. I didn't write it myself.
[edit] ad hominem, misrepresents etc.. too subjective
The ad hominem, misrepresents etc.. bits are too subjective. It comes close to "we will delete anything we disagree with about a cause or person we hold dear". This is not in the same category as libel, death threats etc.. NBeale 10:38, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] 8. We reserve the right to have an opinion
We reserve the right to have an independently formed opinion, and should be given the right to explain our position on said opinion. Healthy criticism is encouraged.
- I think this is part of Responsibility for our own words. You have the right to have an opinion, but you do have responsibility for that. Angela talk 23:53, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
