Paper 2: Free Speech / Advertising
Choose one of the following. Due: Friday, April 20, 2012
Defamation Policy
You and two friends, Alice and Bob, are starting a new website in which
user comments figure prominently. Users comment on various products and
also on the reviews and comments provided by other users. You
anticipate that the majority of users will use their real names on the
site, though pseudonyms are available.
Right now you've agreed to a policy allowing the deletion of profanity
and obvious insults. However, you're having more trouble agreeing to a
policy for dealing with defamatory comments that don't fit into the
obvious profanity/insult categories. Alice has argued
We don't need to do anything; section
230 of the CDA clearly means we have no liability for what our users
post, and thus no obligation to remove libelous content. Many other
sites, such as youtube.com and aol.com, don't seem to remove such
content. How would we determine if an allegedly defamatory post
is in fact true? Would we have to post the other side's position? The
bottom line is that we'd be censoring someone's post based on a
complaint that may or may not be well founded.
Bob is not so sure; his position is that
We simply should not let defamatory
content remain. At the very
least, the possibility that they could be the victim of such an attack
will discourage other users. We need to have a clear standard
of behavior; this is about "takedown" and not about arguing the points
of libel.The bottom line is that we cannot side with injustice, any more than we can side with harassment.
Your job is to propose a policy and then argue in support of it. If you
leave something out of the policy, such as a way for users to complain
that they have been unfairly depicted, be sure you explain why
you don't think the feature is necessary. You should also make clear
whether features of your policy are their to address legal risk to the
site or are there to make users feel more comfortable.
You can take a legalistic approach, an ethical approach, or a
combination. When making ethical arguments in
a business context it is sometimes
helpful to recognize that ethical behavior can be closely tied to a
business's own long-term self-interest.
Source Code and Free Speech
You and co-administrators Charlie and Debra run a git
server to support some open-source software projects you and some friends have been
working on or at least encouraging. Most of the projects have a slightly anti-government tinge:
one project is for end-to-end encryption of voice on smartphones;
another project creates a distributed key-management infrastructure for
the voice encryption. Other projects involve enabling access to sites
that have been "disappeared" from the US DNS system, and doing
untraceable web browsing.
A few years ago you had a project that involved allowing users to break
a certain kind of encryption, but that ran afoul of the DMCA due to the
project's potential use to crack e-book encryption; upon receipt of a
letter from an e-book publisher you agreed no longer to host the
project.
You've recently added a Virus Writers Workbench project; it includes
tools for building viruses. The VWW toolkit allows someone to take a
vulnerability, eg in javascript, and create a virus exploiting that
vulnerability in as little as a few hours. You as virus designer can
have your virus spread from host to host, can access files on the
infected machine, and can enlist the machines you have infected in your
private bot army. The toolkit includes a limited set of known
vulnerabilities, but patches for all of them have been released; the
big potential of VWW is for creating viruses to exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities.
You've recently received a considerable degree of negative press for
the project; this has now resulted in a threatening letter from one
district attorney claiming that the distribution of viruses is a
criminal act, and that distributing pieces of viruses in the toolkit is
equivalent to distributing viruses, and basically asking you to roll
over and delete the project from your servers.
Do you?
Charlie thinks you should go along with the deletion, and ask the
VWW
project managers to find another server. Debra, however, thinks it is
clear you have done nothing wrong, and that it is important for people
-- both within and outside of the computer security industry -- to
understand more about how viruses are created. Keeping tools like VWW
in the closet leads to increased misunderstanding, and thus fear, of
viruses. She argues that the laws
against viruses -- in particular the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act, CFAA -- apply only to their malicious use, spread and
distribution, not to the authoring tools in VWW. Debra further argues we all have a free-speech
right to distribute the information involved. Furthermore, neither the
VWW project nor the VWW community is involved with the discovery and
dissemination of new vulnerabilities that would be the ultimate "carriers" of new viruses.
You have several potential sources of legal support, but to use them
you have to be able to argue that you do indeed have a First-Amendment
right to distribute VWW. Make that argument. Alternatively, argue that VWW is not protected by the First Amendment.
Your paper (either topic) will be graded primarily on organization
(that is, how you lay out your sequence of paragraphs), focus (that is,
whether you stick to the topic), and the nature and completeness of
your arguments.
It is essential
that all material from other sources be enclosed in quotation marks (or
set off as a block quote), and preferably with a citation to the
original source as well.
Expected length: 3-5 pages (600+ words)