5 ms·

> The default must be requiring explicit permission from all participants. That's still the default. There are lots of legitimate use cases for publishing stuf

> The default must be requiring explicit permission from all participants. That's still the default. There are lots of legitimate use cases for publishing stuff without permission though, e.g. emails from Steve Jobs or whatever. Normally when social sites get a lot of traction and then die it's because they go into a death spiral of negativity: e.g. Secret, Whisper, Yik Yak, etc. The best practice for avoiding this is to err on the side of too much friction when launching, and then to reduce friction for people who are contributing positively to the community. That's basically the model we're following. The whole point of the site is to showcase positive interactions between people. E.g. showing conversations between VCs, between academics, lawyers, etc. I think the site is too wonky to get overly negative, but if it starts going that way then we'll be very quick to change things up again.

mirimir 8y ago
> That's still the default. That's good to know. > There are lots of legitimate use cases for publishing stuff without permission though, e.g. emails from Steve Jobs or whatever. Just because he's dead, and was a public figure, is it morally acceptable to publish private email? Or even legal, without permission from his estate? A quick search gives me the following. https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/04/is-it-legal-to-publish-email-correspondence-without-permission.html https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/04/is-it-legal-t... https://writersweekly.com/this-weeks-article/legal_emails https://writersweekly.com/this-weeks-article/legal_emails https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-publish-email-that-someone-sent-to-me https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-... Edit: Also: http://nulawreview.org/extralegalrecent/do-not-forward-why-passing-along-an-email-may-constitute-copyright-infringement http://nulawreview.org/extralegalrecent/do-not-forward-why-p...
- scardine 8y ago
  Of course if he is dead and is a public figure and the other part discloses it the exchange is now part of history. What is wrong with that? I love to read correspondence from folks like Newton[1] for example and I want my grandchildren to be able to read Jobs exchanges as well. [1] http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/correspondence/all http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/correspondence/all
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Based on the cites that I listed, it's not that simple. Edit: Perhaps there's now legitimate public interest for most everything about him. But maybe some Apple-related stuff is still off limits.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  In terms of legality there are two separate issues, invasion of privacy and copyright. Things like privacy / libel / slander generally don't apply to the deceased, so in this case I think we can safely ignore that. With respect to copyright, when you send someone an email you're using an agreed upon protocol (RFC 5322, RFC 5598, etc.) that implicitly grants the recipient a copyright. Now you can say this is a bad argument because no one ever reads those, which is true. But if this weren't true legally, then every time you replied to an email it would be illegal since (in most clients) the full text of the previous email gets copied below the new text. Users also can't really use the platform to violate the copyrights of third parties (e.g. by attaching music or whatever), since the platform is tied to their email account. From an ethical perspective, the reason we specifically excluded whistleblowers as a user story is that you can't build a sustainable business around it, since you can only be a whistleblower once. we've designed it to force uploaders to have skin in the game. E.g. they can't anonymize themselves, and they're forced to link their Gmail accounts. I think that's enough to prevent the vast majority of bad behavior. E.g. you could also copy and paste someone's private email into a HN post, but it's just not done. The only thing we really do is make the process easier by letting people making redactions, anonymize people, send permission requests, etc., but that's not exactly a selling point for people who would be egregiously abusing the site.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    IANAL, and so don't know how libel and slander apply to the deceased. I can imagine how estates might have claims. But ??? And even so, there are all the non-deceased correspondents. I had no clue that email protocols "implicitly grants the recipient a copyright". What are cites for that? Neither https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322 nor https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5598 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5598 includes "coptright" except in the "Copyright Notice". But anyway, I get your point about "forc[ing] uploaders to have skin in the game." Maybe that will be enough. Because, as you say, there are many other ways to leak confidential stuff.
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      The protocols don’t talk about copyright explicitly, but they talk about replying and forwarding. Both of those behaviors are only legal if there is an implicit grant of copyright to the recipient.

mirimir 8y ago

> That's still the default. That's good to know. > There are lots of legitimate use cases for publishing stuff without permission though, e.g. emails from Steve Jobs or whatever. Just because he's dead, and was a public figure, is it morally acceptable to publish private email? Or even legal, without permission from his estate? A quick search gives me the following. https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/04/is-it-legal-to-publish-email-correspondence-without-permission.html https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/04/is-it-legal-t... https://writersweekly.com/this-weeks-article/legal_emails https://writersweekly.com/this-weeks-article/legal_emails https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-publish-email-that-someone-sent-to-me https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-... Edit: Also: http://nulawreview.org/extralegalrecent/do-not-forward-why-passing-along-an-email-may-constitute-copyright-infringement http://nulawreview.org/extralegalrecent/do-not-forward-why-p...

scardine 8y ago
Of course if he is dead and is a public figure and the other part discloses it the exchange is now part of history. What is wrong with that? I love to read correspondence from folks like Newton[1] for example and I want my grandchildren to be able to read Jobs exchanges as well. [1] http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/correspondence/all http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/correspondence/all
- mirimir 8y ago
  Based on the cites that I listed, it's not that simple. Edit: Perhaps there's now legitimate public interest for most everything about him. But maybe some Apple-related stuff is still off limits.
Alex3917 8y ago
In terms of legality there are two separate issues, invasion of privacy and copyright. Things like privacy / libel / slander generally don't apply to the deceased, so in this case I think we can safely ignore that. With respect to copyright, when you send someone an email you're using an agreed upon protocol (RFC 5322, RFC 5598, etc.) that implicitly grants the recipient a copyright. Now you can say this is a bad argument because no one ever reads those, which is true. But if this weren't true legally, then every time you replied to an email it would be illegal since (in most clients) the full text of the previous email gets copied below the new text. Users also can't really use the platform to violate the copyrights of third parties (e.g. by attaching music or whatever), since the platform is tied to their email account. From an ethical perspective, the reason we specifically excluded whistleblowers as a user story is that you can't build a sustainable business around it, since you can only be a whistleblower once. we've designed it to force uploaders to have skin in the game. E.g. they can't anonymize themselves, and they're forced to link their Gmail accounts. I think that's enough to prevent the vast majority of bad behavior. E.g. you could also copy and paste someone's private email into a HN post, but it's just not done. The only thing we really do is make the process easier by letting people making redactions, anonymize people, send permission requests, etc., but that's not exactly a selling point for people who would be egregiously abusing the site.
- mirimir 8y ago
  IANAL, and so don't know how libel and slander apply to the deceased. I can imagine how estates might have claims. But ??? And even so, there are all the non-deceased correspondents. I had no clue that email protocols "implicitly grants the recipient a copyright". What are cites for that? Neither https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322 nor https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5598 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5598 includes "coptright" except in the "Copyright Notice". But anyway, I get your point about "forc[ing] uploaders to have skin in the game." Maybe that will be enough. Because, as you say, there are many other ways to leak confidential stuff.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    The protocols don’t talk about copyright explicitly, but they talk about replying and forwarding. Both of those behaviors are only legal if there is an implicit grant of copyright to the recipient.