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Thanks for making the T&Cs you created available. Did your attorneys make them specific to an individual country/locale or did they make them generic enough to

Thanks for making the T&Cs you created available. Did your attorneys make them specific to an individual country/locale or did they make them generic enough to afford/enhance protection globally? I'm referring to the latter and specifically content as it relates to (potential) illegality. If a site wants to censor or prevent certain content based on their own, personal standards and goals, that's the moral right of the owners. I'm interested in the situations where governments will use force to impose their will (regardless of the personal choices). I'm also interested in the "once you're made aware you need to handle it with whatever declared process you have." Perhaps it differs by locale and, if so, then it would be beneficial for those of us who run sites to start compiling legal agreements into a github repository like you did to help alternative sites become aware of the local legal nuances (especially if the user base is global like reddit or voat). I'm also interested in your comment about advertising - if a community (owner or mods) got to determine which ads (if any) were shown in their community (i.e., the site owners didn't get revenues from ads), would that be supportive of certain site-wide policies? And, again, just to clarify - I'm interested specifically in overriding, all-encompassing site-wide polices, not community-specific policies.

buro9 11y ago
We aimed at UK and EU law as we felt it to be tighter than US law on a lot of these fronts, and yet combined both the ideas of Safe Harbor and DMCA (within the EU eCommerce Directive - "mere conduit"). At the same time, European law put much stricter requirements on personal data restrictions, and the right of people to access and delete their personally identifiable information. The user agreements should be good for most Western countries, but definitely are good for all EU countries. It would have been a very expensive and futile exercise to try and make the agreements good for all countries, I'm not sure anyone tries this, better still to declare which legal domain you will operate in and constrain your terms and operations to those. The site and services we offer, are much akin to Reddit and subreddits... it's a shared platform that hosts distinct communities, and within those communities sub-communities. i.e. https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com is one of almost 300 sites on 1 instance of the platform (other instances exist and are run by other people), and within LFGSS there are several sub-communities with their own moderators, moderation policies, etc. The user agreements we produced dealt with the platform relationship with the admins of a site, and the moderators of forums on a site, and then went on to deal with the minimum required standard for users of a site on the platform. We actually don't stray into finer details of how a specific sub-community may moderate, we simply lay down the minimum standard that all admins and moderators must adhere to. As to the "moral right of the owners"... sure, you can exercise that, but you'll find that removing some content will create a liability of it's own in some legal domains. I would advise people stick to the letter of the law, anything else likely creates liability for the moderators or site owners. On advertising, any site that tries to be of general appeal and also make enough revenue from advertising will need to control the content that appears on the site. Niche sites can avoid this, but the advertising potential is much reduced as a result. If a community received revenue, it would very quickly learn that it can either choose to make more revenue at the cost of adopting content policies, or of making a pittance and having freedom of expression within the content (though still avoiding illegal content). As to whether there is some overriding and all-encompassing policy... a universal policy for internet sites. No, there is not. The requirements of the user agreements and site policies is determined by the business model or activities of the sites and their users. A subtle change in how a site or community operates could lead to a significant difference in the legal documents that would protect it... this is why there is a warning on my policies that anyone using them should have them reviewed by a lawyer, they are fit for purpose for my sites, but may be the death knell of your sites.
- c_prompt 11y ago
  Having now reviewed your documents on Github, I don't find anything that specifies policies on how questionable content is to be dealt with (in line with your comment of just defining minimum required standards for users). I'm interested in the internal polices site admins should take when dealing with questionably legal content.
  - buro9 11y ago
    All of the sites, and all of the communities we host, we advise to strongly follow legal requirements only. They can stray from that if they wish, in which case as the platform owners I can delete content as I see fit in accordance with the law if they do not do so. However if they go further than the recommended minimums of obeying the law, then we educate site admins and moderators that as soon as they exercise their personal judgement that they are opening themselves up to being held personally liable for their decisions and choices. In other words, we obey the strict definition of the law, and any correct legal demands made of us, and we refuse to remove material that someone merely finds objectionable, only doing so when it appears clear that it is in fact illegal. Questionable content is therefore left on all of the sites. But then, we don't have advertisers to deal with.

buro9 11y ago

We aimed at UK and EU law as we felt it to be tighter than US law on a lot of these fronts, and yet combined both the ideas of Safe Harbor and DMCA (within the EU eCommerce Directive - "mere conduit"). At the same time, European law put much stricter requirements on personal data restrictions, and the right of people to access and delete their personally identifiable information. The user agreements should be good for most Western countries, but definitely are good for all EU countries. It would have been a very expensive and futile exercise to try and make the agreements good for all countries, I'm not sure anyone tries this, better still to declare which legal domain you will operate in and constrain your terms and operations to those. The site and services we offer, are much akin to Reddit and subreddits... it's a shared platform that hosts distinct communities, and within those communities sub-communities. i.e. https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com is one of almost 300 sites on 1 instance of the platform (other instances exist and are run by other people), and within LFGSS there are several sub-communities with their own moderators, moderation policies, etc. The user agreements we produced dealt with the platform relationship with the admins of a site, and the moderators of forums on a site, and then went on to deal with the minimum required standard for users of a site on the platform. We actually don't stray into finer details of how a specific sub-community may moderate, we simply lay down the minimum standard that all admins and moderators must adhere to. As to the "moral right of the owners"... sure, you can exercise that, but you'll find that removing some content will create a liability of it's own in some legal domains. I would advise people stick to the letter of the law, anything else likely creates liability for the moderators or site owners. On advertising, any site that tries to be of general appeal and also make enough revenue from advertising will need to control the content that appears on the site. Niche sites can avoid this, but the advertising potential is much reduced as a result. If a community received revenue, it would very quickly learn that it can either choose to make more revenue at the cost of adopting content policies, or of making a pittance and having freedom of expression within the content (though still avoiding illegal content). As to whether there is some overriding and all-encompassing policy... a universal policy for internet sites. No, there is not. The requirements of the user agreements and site policies is determined by the business model or activities of the sites and their users. A subtle change in how a site or community operates could lead to a significant difference in the legal documents that would protect it... this is why there is a warning on my policies that anyone using them should have them reviewed by a lawyer, they are fit for purpose for my sites, but may be the death knell of your sites.

c_prompt 11y ago
Having now reviewed your documents on Github, I don't find anything that specifies policies on how questionable content is to be dealt with (in line with your comment of just defining minimum required standards for users). I'm interested in the internal polices site admins should take when dealing with questionably legal content.
- buro9 11y ago
  All of the sites, and all of the communities we host, we advise to strongly follow legal requirements only. They can stray from that if they wish, in which case as the platform owners I can delete content as I see fit in accordance with the law if they do not do so. However if they go further than the recommended minimums of obeying the law, then we educate site admins and moderators that as soon as they exercise their personal judgement that they are opening themselves up to being held personally liable for their decisions and choices. In other words, we obey the strict definition of the law, and any correct legal demands made of us, and we refuse to remove material that someone merely finds objectionable, only doing so when it appears clear that it is in fact illegal. Questionable content is therefore left on all of the sites. But then, we don't have advertisers to deal with.