At 6:10 PM -0700 6/20/00, Tim May wrote: >At 4:54 PM -0700 6/20/00, Lizard wrote: >>Matthew Gaylor wrote: >>> >>> =====> Beaver College bows to pressure and changes name >>> Author: Connie Langland >>> State: PA, Country: United States >>> URL: >>> http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/06/13/city/BEAVER13.htm >>> Description: >>> "In a closed-door meeting Friday, the college's board of trustees >>> voted, 23-1, to abandon the troublesome title for ... what? >>> 'Something else,' college spokesman Bill Avington said." They >>> are tired of Internet filters refusing access to the college's >>> sites. (6/13/00) >>> >>It seems to me this is AMPLE grounds for a defamation lawsuit. Pity the >>college board chose to switch rather than fight. >> >>What about references to the mascot of MIT? > >More nonsense about "defamation lawsuits"? > >In a free society a person or group or company is free to give >advice about sites to visit, restaurants to eat in, films to see or >not see. > >If a filter company is dumb enough to have filters which reject on >the word "beaver" alone, and if customers are dumb enough to use >these filters, so be it. In a free society there is no grounds for >either state intervention or lawsuit. > >(Remember, lawsuits hinge on "matters of law." There is no >conceivable matter of law here.) If I tell you should not see a movie because it stars Woody Allen, when, in fact, Woody Allen is not in the movie, the issue is not my telling you to not see the movie, but my lying about the contents. If I tell you "Do not eat at Joe's Diner, the food stinks", that is my right -- if I tell you "Do not eat at Joe's Diner, he serves dead alley cats in his meat loaf", then I am committing both fraud and defamation. (Assuming that Joe does not use felines as an ingredient in his cuisine, and that I knew this.) If I declare that a web page 'contains pornography', when it does not, I am committing an act of fraud (lying about the contents of the page) and an act of defamation (stating the page owner is distributing pornography). If someone were to attempt to sell a perpetual motion machine, even the most libertarian of folk would consider it to be inherently fraudulent. No contract made for such a device can be considered legally or morally valid, because one party CANNOT, as a matter of universal law, fulfill the terms of it. Anyone is, indeed, free to give advice about what to do or not do, see or not see, read or not read. They are NOT free to blatantly lie about goods or services, especially not to the detriment of the provider of such services. Point blank -- it is time the censors knew fear. Let them cower and quake for once. One succesful lawsuit on 'false blocking' and the entire censorware business would be exterminated -- no company can manage anything approaching reasonable accuracy. This is one of those very rare cases where the mechanisms of oppression can be turned on the oppressors for minimal risk.
