At 09:08 31-10-2002 -0600, Dan Minette wrote:
If poster X writes "Jeroen, you are an asshole", and I put that post up on a website, how can it possibly be libelous? I am merely quoting said poster.> > Well, who wrote "Corrupted-World-of-Brin-L Website:"? If listmember > > "J" uses a website to slam the list, or threatens to do so, with the > > implicit threat that some members of the list may have libelous > > information posted about them, are other listmembers not allowed to > > say anything about it? How are other listmembers supposed to react to > > that? Say nothing? > > It's an idea that might perhaps work. It hasn't been tried so far and > everything else failed. But males in general, usually aren't very good at > that. So I forgive you. ;o)You appear to ignore extemely credible evidence that has been presented on Brin-l.detailing how such a threat cannot simply be ignored. The problem with such a website with names and libel is that it is extremely visable. Let us assume that a curious person who heard about Gautam would type in his name. It is probable that it would list Jeroen's page as one of the first hits. The same is true with my name.
IMHO, nobody should go work for such an employer; after all, what the employer is doing in such a case is telling the employee what s/he can and cannot do and say in his/her spare time. I can imagine that an employer would be opposed to letting employees send out controversial personal e-mails from work, but what an employee does outside work hours is the employee's business, not the employer's.Gautam said that his employer would require him to quit the list; they don't like conterversy.
And then of course there is this little thing called "freedom of speech".
First, an employer who would use a couple of e-mails as a reason to not hire a person, would be a lousy employer anyway. If he uses that sort of methods, he is likely to use other questionable reasons as well to decide whether or not to fire an employee (such as "how often does this employee leave his desk to get some coffee?" and "I am a smoker -- is this employee opposed to smoking?"). Not the kind of employer *I* would want to work for.Other folks, who are looking for work, might face a situation when a situation when someone doing due dilligence might simply types their names into a search engine and comes up with that website as a hit. They might not even be told why they were not offered a job. Yes, they might not, too. But, it is not beyond the pale to expect someone to spend 3 minutes checking on the public information available on someone looking for work. I do not see how you can ask someone to have ignored your husbands threats to people's livelihoods.
Second, it would not make any difference if I would put such messages on a website, because those messages are already a matter of public record (they are available from at least two on-line archives).
Jeroen "You do the crime, you do the time" van Baardwijk
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