Hell, I OWNED two weekly alternative newspapers for several years. I didn’t have a lawyer on staff. When a story was that sensitive I went to a law firm for review. It was expensive as hell.
If I invited someone into my home and they threatened to sue me for a “free speech violation” or something equally as stupid, I would quickly invite them to leave immediately. For starters, I don’t know why someone would even want to stay in my house if they felt as though they weren’t given the same courtesies to speak as the rest, so that’s just weird. But mostly, if you’re coming to MY HOUSE and threatening me because you don’t like the way I run my house, you can get the fuck right back out. I’m not letting you stay so you can find another reason to screw up my day and my checkbook.
Some things go without saying. If you offed a moderator you’d be banned but that doesn’t need to be specified, it’s a given as is threatening harm. Threatening legal action however is another thing and would need specifying.
Nah, everything can be “rules-lawyered” if you’re persistent.
Speaking for myself here - and not for STM or Tubadiva or anyone else - you must realize that the top goal here is survival of the SDMB. Not discussion, not community, not anything. If the board doesn’t survive then nothing else matters.
Given the stated nature from on high that ‘any lawsuit shuts things down’ our zero tolerance policy makes sense. It’s the only sensible thing we can do.
That’s nothing at all like BwanaBob’s idea that they have a lawyer on staff who isn’t doing much most of the time, and therefore can review the entire message history of a litigious poster and everyone talking to him, then offer a legal opinion on what to say to said poster without anyone paying extra money. “Charged by the hour” is pretty key there, it’s a lot more cost effective to just ban someone than to drag in a charge-by-the-hour lawyer to oversee interactions with them.
I never once said that the STM would/could have a lawyer review every message a poster has written.
Please reread the thread.
Without wanting to tempt fate I do have to ask the question, why then do they bother keeping it open at all? Seems like a prime candidate for closing a stable door after the horse has bolted.
The answer has always been that we make a small amount of money for our varied - over time - corporate overlords.
We need to make sure that continues.
I worked for several of the Time-Life magazines and I can assure you that everything printed in the pages of Time, Life, and People (especially People) is read by someone with a law degree prior to publication. I should probably say “was read,” they also had proofreaders and copy editors back then. Maybe not so much these days.
At People we had a long list of stories we wanted to publish but could not because the legal team felt we couldn’t prove to legal satisfaction/were subject to potential libel. The passage of time has brought most of these stories to light (sometimes not until after the death of the parties involved) but were eventually brought into the public, though mostly not by People.
The Reader was also looked at by attorneys because they had a high amount of investigative content. Not so much today, it was a different time, they used to have a team of reporters that broke big stories. Once upon a time. They ran stories that could have been deemed actionable. Reader stories have sent people to prison.
YMMV
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Reader management used to like us, really really liked us, even though they didn’t understand what we were doing. I vividly remember attending a meeting where the managing editor said, “We don’t know what the F*** you do, really, but that’s okay.”
It’s nice when people have faith in you.
Successive management has had more appreciation. As Dr. Seuss didn’t write, *“An asset’s an asset, no matter how small.” *
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
No, he was great. I was a little guy.
You said that you thought they would have a lawyer who could advise on how to respond to a poster threatening a lawsuit. Generally in order to provide competent legal advice, they’d need to read everything involving that poster to figure out what might be actionable involving the person and what might be an issue because of things other people have said about the person. Lawyers giving legal advice beyond things like ‘ban him and be done with it’ without knowing the details of the potential case are not doing themselves or their clients any good - so in this case, the lawyer would either review every message the lawsuit-threatening poster has written, or would be giving bad advice. It’s a lot more work than you seem to think it is, and a lot riskier professionally for the lawyer to make statements on off of little knowledge.
For what it’s worth, I don’t question the policy. Makes sense to me. Don’t feed the mouths that bite your hand.
~Max
Probably because the chances of being sued is quite small.
Back when I was in college, the university’s newspaper’s insurance policy ran out while they were trying to renegotiate the coverage details. In order to continue publishing day-to-day, they used the services of a lawyer, who read every word cover-to-cover before allowing them to send the files to the printing company.
This, of course, is the big qualifier. It was the University’s staff attorney who was pre-reading everything for them. In the newspaper article about the situation it appeared to be a charitable gesture, but I suspect someone high in the University’s pyramid had some influence in getting that attorney to do extra work each night to keep the college free of libel-suits. And the university’s staff, of course, was a lot more than 60 people.
–G