Matthew Brown wrote:
On 1/12/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
My point was not about permissions. It even assumes that we will receive all the permissions we want. It's about why we are better suited to carry this material than Northwestern U. It's about the ethics of a Borg-ism that indiscriminately vacuums up all the material it can find.
I'm not sure that this is a matter of us thinking we're a better host than Northwestern U for anyone else. It's us thinking that for our own use, we're a better host than them, because having a local copy is good. Because they might move their stuff in future or even take it down. Lots of reasons that for our own purposes, taking our own copy is useful.
Absolutely, there's lots of reasons, but the reasons should be there on an item by item basis. Do we need to indiscriminately host their entire corpus of maps when we only have use for a few? Even the argument that something might be taken down needs to be on a case by case basis, and not base it on unfounded speculation. There are some sites, not major universities, where this would be a worry. A site where there has been no new activity in the last couple of years might be a cause for concern.
We all love to hate M*******t, partly because it dominates its industry. We need to be conscious of not becoming resentfully referred to as W*******a because of our dominance. I think that it's important to view ourselves as a part of a community of websites developing free access to information. That requires maintaining the respect of other members of that community, and you don't do that by raiding their efforts. The survival of a vision depends on sharing that vision, and that cannot happen if our allied co-visionaries are put in a position where they need to defend their efforts from the superpower on the block.
Ethical considerations rest upon forseeing the consequences of one's own actions. Ethics are not governed by rules and laws, nor are they imposed through fear of arbitrary ounishment. Ethics involves a willingness to be at a disadvantage when it is the right thing to do.
Ec