On Feb 8, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Luke Faraone wrote: > It may pose as a legal liability for Sugar Labs, however, as Ivan > pointed out: Chains of trust represent also a chain of legal > liability, and whoever is on top is painting a giant "sue me" target > on their back if anyone below screws up, gives incorrect > information, or information that's used incorrectly. Could ask your > contacts at the SFLC to assess SL's liability in this situation?
Healthcare texts are illustrative. The risk is that, left entirely to decentralized distribution with no integrity protection, it's hard to prevent inadvertent or malicious editing or tampering with the written material, and the subsequent redistribution of this altered form. This is annoying if the material is a programming book, but dangerous to life and limb _and_ lawsuit-inviting when the material is a book on medicine. To attempt to mitigate the issue, one might think of having a known- good central site which performs basic due diligence on the healthcare materials that are posted. It's not clear such a site should be operated by Sugar Labs due to both liability and core competency issues, but if it's indeed not operated by Sugar Labs, it's not clear how the site's better-than-random trustworthiness can be communicated to the end user. Note that I'm not advocating any particular solution, as I don't feel I've thought about the problem enough. It may be that a decentralized model is fine, and purely social mechanisms can be relied on to effectively spread information about the trustworthiness of certain online information sources. (One recent example of high-profile manipulation of health-related information is <http://is.gd/iPKc> from two years ago.) -- Ivan Krstić <krs...@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep