Defamation

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 20 Oct 2015 03:28 am, Laura Creighton wrote:

> Actually, this one was part of a huge set of defaming articles sent a
> year ago we were requested to remove, and did.  European Law may
> require us to do so.  I checked, and this article wasn't one on
> our list, which is why we missed this one.

I don't believe that the Python mailing list archives are hosted in a
country under the jurisdiction of European Law. If I'm right, then removing
posts sets a dangerous precedent of obeying laws in foreign countries that
don't apply.

Today we're removing allegedly defaming posts because European law may or
may not apply (probably doesn't); tomorrow we're removing posts because
they fall foul of unreasonable laws anywhere in the world.

E.g. suppose I say that the Thai king can't program for crap. If I were
under the jurisdiction of Thai law, I might be in trouble for offending the
dignity of the king.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lèse-majesté

Fortunately I'm not, but if I were, I would hope that my post(s) would not
be deleted just because some touchy royal got his nose out of joint.

Or if I happen to mention some (hypothetical) data-mining program I've
written which demonstrates that the judeo-christian god is clearly derived
from earlier polytheistic Hebrew traditions, I might be in trouble for
blasphemy in various countries. And let's not even touch on anything to do
with sharia law...

The point is, obeying laws that don't apply, even if well-meaning, opens us
to a dangerous precedent that we shouldn't go near.

There's another reason to try very, very hard to avoid deleting archived
posts: until such time as python.org moves to Mailman3, deleting a single
posts breaks the permalinks for *every single post* for the entire month.



-- 
Steven