Domain: slashdotmedia.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to slashdotmedia.com.
Comments · 54
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Re:here's a suggestion
I have 2 reasons to play the race card here. 1) It was a one-liner AC comment. They are almost always racist, insulting, or just downright vile.
ACs are AC not - in general - to spew racist BS (whether or not that other AC did...).
The reasons for being AC include:
1) Too lazy to login or register
2) Not posting from a secure vantage
3) Too stupid to login or register
4) Not wanting to link posts to the same identity.
5) Not agreeing to the ToS or so-called Privacy Policy. Everyone logged in and in the US faces a federal crime if they have failed to:
"(a) provide accurate, current, and complete information about yourself as prompted by our registration form (including your e-mail address) and (b) to maintain and update your information (including your e-mail address) to keep it accurate, current, and complete."
http://slashdotmedia.com/terms...So using a throw away email address (and throwing it away - abandoning) is a federal crime here. Might as well have a "real name" policy.
3) It was an AC trollin. Can't I troll back?
You can. I can't stop you from being a troll.
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Re:Charge them as felons!
According to slashdot media's T&C's if you are under 18 you need your parent or guardian's permission to access Slashdot.
Would you consider it reasonable to charge a 17 year old with a crime for using Slashdot without parents' permission?
Bear in mind, Slashdot media wouldn't need to be involved. The government could choose to prosecute anyway. -
SourceForge has shown it can't be trusted.
SourceForge has shown it can't be trusted. The only way they could regain trust at this point is by legally committing themselves to never bundling anything with an installer, and using an open source installer. Instead, their terms still read "We reserve the right at our sole discretion and at any time to
... change the terms and conditions of this Agreement."Sorry, SourceForge. You got caught. Promising you won't do it again isn't good enough. That's just PR spin.
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Re:Is this even constitutional?
TL;DR: Yes, yes, no, probably not.
I am not a lawyer, I am certainly not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just read a lot of laws, and have far too many lawyer friends for my own good...
aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later?
Per the conditions of your site's Terms of Service (you do have them, don't you?), the content your users give you may or may not be retained, retransmitted, adapted, or whatever else. By using the site, your users agree to that and grant you permission. Those terms govern what you can do with what you're given. For example, Slashdot's terms say that by commenting, you're giving them permission to publish your comments indefinitely, in pretty much any form they want. Under Slashdot's terms, that permission cannot be rescinded.
Minors are special. Despite the apparent common opinion here, they can enter into a contract... they just usually can't be forced to uphold their end of it. As far as copyright permission goes, this means you probably are already under a legal obligation to remove it if they want, because they can choose to void the contract giving you the permission... but to make you do that, the minor would have to realize the intricacies of contract law, realize that they still have exclusive copyright over their posting, and figure out how to contact you to request removal.
California's law requires an accessible way to remove (or request the removal of) a minor's own posting, that stops whatever's deleted from being published further. It's practically irrelevant, since most sites already have such a function... the problem is that it's hard to find, and people don't use it nearly as quickly as they should. The law only requires that such a function be "clear". Good luck with that.
Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.
am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever
The law doesn't have any time limit built into it, so time limits will be up to the courts to decide, but the law also doesn't require you to actually erase the data. You're only forbidden from retransmitting it, so if your site has a self-service delete button, that's probably fine. If you take your whole site offline, nobody can get to it, so that's probably fine, too. Bringing it back later with all the old content intact is riskier. The exact type of site also matters, because the law only comes into effect if you know that minors are using it. A forum dedicated to the latest teen heartthrobs would obviously fall into that category, but a forum for discussing do-it-yourself RV repairs probably wouldn't.
I highly recommend reading the actual text of the law. The first part is prohibiting certain advertisements toward minors, but the erasure part starts at section 22581. As with all legal text, realize that it's written to cover as much as possible, so try to ignore the repetition and it becomes much easier to read.