On 5/4/07, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
G'day Todd,
On 5/3/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/4/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Fully agreed there. We could write -an article- on the speed of light without ever numerically specifying that speed. We could write -an article- on the United States without putting in its population as of the last census. But while we could indeed write such articles, they are not comprehensive or complete.
Your analogies are poor. An accurate analogy for this situation would be, for example, an article on legal proceedings where the names of some of the parties have been suppressed by the court. A perfectly comprehensive article could be written about the legal proceedings without the need to break the law and use the names.
I think any rational court would realize that its "suppression" is meaningless once a link to the real names hits everything from Digg to Slashdot to blogs to the New York Times.
Let's push Stephen's analogy. Suppose you wanted to write about a child abuse case where the Supreme Court had ordered the victims' names suppressed.
Would you include the names of the victims? What if you found a forum post where a schoolmate of the victims had posted the names already?
-- Mark Gallagher "'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend."
- P G Wodehouse, /Carry On, Jeeves/
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It depends. One forum, or a few, absolutely not. In that case, the names of the victims are still semi-secret, even if they can be found with some digging. (In that case, I probably would, given my own personal ethics, not publish the names of the child(ren) involved even if -no- court order were in place.)
On the other hand, if the names of the children were so damn famous they'd become news stories of their own, and there were hundreds of thousands of places including mainstream news you could find them, yes, absolutely, I would. In that case, the secret's out of the bag long since, and it's never going back in. I am, in that case, doing no harm to anyone by publishing those names. Nor am I violating the court order that mandates the names remain secret-they're -already- not secret in any way whether I publish too or not. In that case, for me to hold back and suppress the names is no longer responsible, it is silly. And here, it is -silly-.
Now, of course, in this case, we're not talking about some poor, innocent, abused child. We're talking about thugs (and thugs in fancy suits who know how to write legal papers are still thugs, a SLAPP or the threat thereof is every bit the equivalent of a gun in the face), who decided they could push people around, using a law that has not an ounce of constitutional merit to begin with. Now, in most cases, they'd be right, and I'd sure not be up for saying "HEY! Next time someone breaks an encryption key, let's let 'em publish it on Wikipedia first!" That's not in keeping with our place or our mission, and it would likely land us in a hell of a lot of trouble, just to do something we shouldn't be doing anyway (being a first publisher). It -is-, however, our place and mission to note topics of genuine noteworthiness, and not to suppress any details because someone might not like them. And if we cave -this- time, mark it, everyone in the world with a lawyer and a dislike for anything on Wikipedia will note it.
You think our legal "issues" are bad now, wait until everyone reads the "WIKIPEDIA CAVES TO SLAPP THREAT" across the headlines. If we can't deal with one squad of nicely-dressed thugs, I certainly don't know how we're going to deal with the thousand me-toos. Right now, we can nip that in the bud, just by saying "Hey, you can't just make a whisper about legal action and have us take down anything you don't like." Or we can say "Hey, send us a letter from a lawyer (or don't even bother doing that, just make it sound like you -might- send a letter from a lawyer), and anything you dislike, regardless of how true or well-sourced it is, is gone -posthaste-."
I know which project I would rather work on. What about you?