Alex Satrapa wrote:
> A web hosting service provides a lot more than just a location for
> displaying web pages.
> Apart from designing the layout, producing the graphics and providing
> comment on structure, the service hosting a web site is responsible for
> censoring its content.
Some web hosting services certainly do provide these services for their clients,
others do not.
Thanks for the other information about criminal responsibility. That was very
informative and makes me happy not to live down under. It may be just the beginning of
a trend in other countries around the world, though, so my happiness may be
shortlived!
Still, are we talking about "DC.Publisher" here, or is it rather a form of
"DC.Rights"? Censoring content vs. being responsible for the accuracy of content seems
to me to be different ideas. I would think that putting illegal information on the web
is not the same as putting out incorrect information.
> Then again, if you're cataloging the Internet, it may be useful to your
> clients to be able to separate out stuff that is *not* "published" by
> Geocities. Filtering out content based on publisher will be a lot
> cheaper than filtering out content on the actual content.
These are some interesting points:
1) there are many things that may be considered *useful* that are really not worth the
effort. For example, it may be *useful* for a very few people to search all books with
666 pages--but making this possible can be a lot of work, incomparison with the small
gain, and it can actually make more common searching more difficult.
An example. When we installed our catalog several years ago, we decided to index the
entire catalog record. As a result, searching by numbers became much more difficult
since the page numbers, book sizes and lots of other numbers got mixed in with the
more meaningful numbers.
Some said that "with the correct search, you could get around it." But the *correct*
searches were considered to be far beyond the capabilities of the average user.
We later reworked the indexes to forms that are more readily understandable by
non-specialists.
2) "Filtering by content" is an interesting idea, but are we talking about making some
sort of substitute for PICS and NetNanny? And couldn't all of this easily be avoided
by aliases?
Besides, censoring all works from a printer/web hosting service does not seem to be a
good idea. There can be some excellent sites on geocities.com, along with lots of
junk.
I don't see how you can make a judgement concerning the content of a page just because
it's on a certain web hosting service.
So, the example of making a search, excluding a certain service makes me very
uncomfortable.
Jim Weinheimer
Princeton University
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