At 11:18 PM 1/1/97 -0600, you wrote:
>The list manager has no responsibilities whatsoever for stopping the exchange
>of rude e-mail messages between 2 list members. He should not get in the
>middle, nor assume that he is capable of changing anyone's behavior. He
>certainly should not take it upon himself to examine the contents of the
>messages to decide whether or not there is harassment.
>
Lets look at a worst case:
Lets assume that you run a free list for who cares what.
In Jan and Feb many users complain that a list member threatens to kill them
and they inform you and you do nothing and leave the person on your list.
In Mar a new user joins your list and is threaten by the same user. In Apr
the user does get killed by this person. The victims family sues you for
negligence because you took no action. They claim that if you had just
kicked the person off of the list in Jan or Feb this murder would have never
occurred. They believe that a person could reasonably expect that the list
manager would remove dangerous members or warn new members that a danger may
exist.
NEGLIGENCE involves carelessness that injures another person. There are 4
parts to Negligence:
1. Duty.
2. Breaking a standard of care.
3. Proximate Cause
4. Damages.
1. As a list manager you DO HAVE duties and responsibilities. Just ask
Prodigy. I think that the judge stated that their duty began once they were
aware of the problem or should have been aware. Duties almost always exist
where danagers exist. In this case you do have a duty to do something.
2. The standard of care is based on what the ordinary, reasonable and
prudent person would do. Such a person WOULD take some action against a
user in the light of multiple complaints from multiple people about the same
person.
3. Clearly, if you had kicked the vile user off when the problems first
occurred the murder would not have occurred. If you had informed the new
user was threating the kill poeple he/she may not have joined the list.
4. The dead person was obviously damaged.
I would assume that Prodigy had as good attorney as you could get and a
court stated that list manager ARE responsible for some actions. Why are
you not?
I'm not an attorney but I will share this with you. My day job is with a 30
Billion dollar corporation at which I am one of the Webmaster. The legal
department demanded that we NOT receive email to the Webmaster account.
Their reason was basically this "Once you are notified of certain types of
events you have a legal and moral obligation to take action." They did not
want a Webmaster responsible for a 30 billion corporation loosing a
multimillion dollar law suit.
The odds of you successfully defending yourself against the law suit above
is slim I think.
The question is not DO you have responsibilities. The question is HOW MUCH
responsibly do you have. Although this has gone into legal areas my
original Idea was this: If I, as a list manager, have spent months or years
building an online community I am not going to allow 1 nutty member to
destroy it?
OK. I'm done with this topic.
__________________________________________________________________
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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