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"Tom McDonald" <rocketman@familySPAMTHIS,PALradio.com> writes:
> Todd Lehman writes:
>
> > Below is a snippet from the Terms of Use for lugnet.com. Someone who is in
> > violation of these terms runs the risk of being kicked off the system. • <snip>
> > DISCUSSION GROUP TERMS AND CONDITIONS
> >
> > LUGNET includes discussion groups which allow feedback and
> > interaction between users. LUGNET and its owners and/or operators
> > do not control or censor messages, information, or files delivered
> > to discussion groups. It is a condition of your use of the
> > discussion groups that you do not:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > 5. Post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous,
> > defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, or indecent
> > information of any kind, including without limitation any
> > transmissions constituting or encouraging conduct that would
> > constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or
> > otherwise violate any local, state, national, or international
> > law.
>
> LUGmaster,
>
> Would any of the above include posts of people's names who have not paid or
> delivered with regards to auctions or sales? Defamation in a dictionary of
> which I looked had two out of its three definitions not mentioning the
> involvement of any kind of falfse pretense, in which case I might be mentioning
> the truth _and_ harming someone's reputation simultaneously.
Good question. The spirit behind the word "defamatory" in that case is to
note that the following should be avoided: slanderous or libelous
statements, falsely accusing someone of a crime or offense, falsely
assailing the character of another, etc. -- basically you want to avoid
injuring someone with false charges or statements.
OTOH, if someone rips you off and you have lots of proof (like what happened
to some people with Chris Garner last year), then that's a different story
because you (hopefully) wouldn't be making false accusations. And it
arguably benefits the community as a whole to be made aware of such
situations.
I think it all depends on how much proof you have. Certainly you should
always be able to share purely factual information with others -- ("I sent a
check and my bank says it was cashed and he said he mailed my stuff but I
haven't received it yet") -- but you'd want to make sure you kept it to the
facts as you know them -- (so try not to say "I paid him and he never sent
my stuff and he's a lying scumbag").
I am not a laywer and this is not legal advice, but basically, if you always
tell the truth and stick to the facts without name-calling or label-applying
or wrong-conclusion-drawing, I think you're probably in the clear. Of
course, always do what you can first to work things out before dragging
someone's name through the mud; sometimes people make mistakes or forget
things or lose their Internet connections or lose their jobs or have family
emergencies.
--Todd
p.s. "Vulgar" is another fuzzy and difficult-to-define word there. An
example of the types of things that "vulgar" was intended to discourage in
that context is postings about, oh, say, the classification, enumeration,
and naming of the myriad varieties of solid and liquid human excrement;
there are plenty of other places on the Internet specially designed for
that sort of thing. These are LEGO-centric newsgroups, after all.
[followups set to lugnet.admin.general]
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