At 09:43 PM 1/1/97 -0600, you wrote:
>The other problem that comes in to play is various "rights" that people
think they
>have. If you leave the position of list maintainer and go into list
moderation,
>which you would be doing if you cut someone from the list for their
viewpoint or
>comments to others on the list, then you become a target of law suites as well.
I doubt that any court would conclude that any has a RIGHT to be on a list.
Courts HAVE concluded that list managers have responsiblies to curtail list
members behavior.
>Since you stopped joe from posting, you should also stop sam, and since you
didn't
>I'm going to sue for harrassment and stress, etc. Your the target now as well
>as the parties involved. I can't rememeber with of the big (aol,
compuserve, etc)
>companies lost on this as they were doing content checks and failed to stop a
>flame war. The judge said that since they were acting as moderators, they
couldn't
>do half a job so they lost big bucks plus all the legal fees. DON'T put
yourself
>in such a position.
I belive that it was Prodigy and I'm not talking about moderating. I am
talking about protecting list members from Unusal attacks or abuse.
I belive that a Texas court DID take some form of action against a person
for "email harassment".
In a civil suit I would belive that juries and judges would frown on a list
manager more for not doing any thing in the face of numerous complaints from
multiple people than they would for you booting someone off your list or
doing nothing.
My point is: As the man in charge you should try to stay out of things.
However, you do have a responsiblity to sometimes step in
and make the hard choices.
Remeber, a list is NOT a right and it is NOT a Democrocy.
It is a free service subject to the will of the party running it.
__________________________________________________________________
Copyright 1996 (c) Penn Jennings
Penn Jennings
jennings@cyberca.com
http://www.cyberca.com/~jennings/
The road to evil is paved with good intentions.
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