Am 01.12.2011 20:06, schrieb Tom Morris:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 09:11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is not a theoretical risk. This has
happened. Most famously in
the case of Virgin using pictures of persons that were licenced under
a free licence, in their advertising campaign. I hesitate to call this
argument fatuous, but it's relevance is certainly highly
questionable. Nobody has raised this is as a serious argument except
you assume it
has been. This is the bit that truly is a straw horse. The "downstream
use" objection
was *never* about downstream use of _content_ but downstream use of _labels_ and
the structuring of the semantic data. That is a real horse of a
different colour, and not
of straw.
I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the
general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might
reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do
quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world
that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that
(your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more
efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens?
If they provide a
piece of software that can be used for evil things
than it is ok, as long they don't support the use of the software for
such purposes. Otherwise we would have to stop the development of
Windows, Linux, Mac OS in the first place. What we do is different. We
provide a weak tool, but we provide strong support for the evil detail.
I called it weak since everyone should be able to disable it at any
point he wants (if even enabled). But i also called it strong, because
we provide the actual data for misuse through our effort to label
content as inappropriate to some.
I'm not at all sure how you concluded that I was
suggesting filtering
groups would be reusing the content? Net Nanny doesn't generally need
to include copies of Autofellatio6.jpg in their software. The reuse of
the filtering category tree, or even the unstructured user data, is
something anti-filter folk have been concerned about. But for the most
part, if a category tree were built for filtering, it wouldn't require
much more than identifying clusters of categories within Commons. That
is the point of my post. If you want to find adult content to filter,
it's pretty damn easy to do: you can co-opt the existing extremely
detailed category system on Commons ("Nude images including Muppets",
anybody?).
I had a nice conversation with Jimbo about this categories and i guess
we came to the conclusion that it would not work that way you used it
for an argument. At some point we will have to provide the user with
some kind of interface in that he can easily select what should be
filtered and what not. Giving the users a choice from a list containing
hundreds of categories wouldn't work, because even Jimbo refuses it as
to complicated and unsuited to be used. What would need to be done is to
group this close to neutral (existing) category clusters up to more
general terms to reduce the number of choices. But this clusters can
then be easily be misused. That essential means for a category/label
based filter:
The more user friendly it is, the more likely it is to be abused.
Worrying that filtering companies will co-opt a new
system when the
existing system gets them 99% of the way anyway seems just a little
overblown.
Adapting a new source for inexpensive filter data was never a problem
and is usually quickly done. It costs a lot of worktime (money) to
maintain filter lists, but it is really cheap to set up automated
filtering. Thats why many filters based on Googles filtering tools
exist, even so Google makes a lot of mistakes.
It isn'
one incidence, it isn't a class of incidences. Take it on board that
the community is against the *principle* of censorship. Please.
As I said in the
post, there may still be good arguments against
filtering. The issue of principle may be very strong - and Kim Bruning
made the point about the ALA definition, for instance, which is a
principled rather than consequentialist objection.
Generally, though, I don't particularly care *what* people think, I
care *why* they think it. This is why the debate over this has been so
unenlightening, because the arguments haven't actually flowed, just
lots of emotion and anger.
nya~