On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 03:34, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
While I don't find that line of argument to be a fully fledged straw-horse argument, it does appear to me to be a cherry-picked argument to *attempt* to refute. There are much stronger arguments, both practical and philosophical, at any attempt to elide controversial content. Even as such, I am not convinced by the argumentation, but would not prefer to rebut an argument that does not address the strongest reasons for opposing elision of controversial content, by choice or otherwise.
My point was not to provide an argument for or against any particular implementation. It was a response to one particularly god-awful argument.
I honestly didn't intend to make a full rebuttal of your line of reasoning, but I do feel you are forcing my hand a bit. So here goes.
"People who create photos or music or anything else and license it [under a free licence] and the risk that someone they don’t like ends up using “their” content. I wouldn’t be too pleased if I found that one of the articles I’d written for Wikinews or one of the photos I’d put on Commons turned up on websites affiliated with, say, the British National Party. But that’s a risk I run from licensing stuff freely."
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.
Here is the first installment of my rebuttal. I don't want to go the tl;dr. route, so I'll chop it into easy chunks.