On 10/2/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
What it appears Danny would like is a rule that people would have to agree to such that they would behave.
I don't know if thats what danny was advocating, but it sounds good to me.
But you can't legislate against misunderstanding or malice. What effective penalty can we apply? We can't even stop people editing if they really want to.
You are correct that there are some bad people that we can't stop. But everyone that causes us problems isn't a judgement proof 14 year old kid jumping coffee shops...
The reality is that a nontrivial number of our problem causers are corporations which don't have the sort of immunity which makes the TOS irrelevant.
It would be really nice that on the third time some foolish advertising company calls us up threatening to sue because we deleted their drivel that we can turn around and say "No, we're going to sue you..." :)
And really, if we don't make it clear to all that we respect ourselves... we can't expect other people to respect us.
It would be hard to actually prevent people spraypainting ads on the side of a public library, and yet incidents of people doing that are unheard of...
[snip]
The solution to bad behaviour is as unlikely to be "let's add LOTS of new rules" as it is to be "let's add a new rule" when the problem is editors who don't care about existing rules.
There is no one solution, there are only improvements.