[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

Thu Dec 1 09:11:47 UTC 2011

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 03:34, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
> <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> While I don't find that line of argument to be a fully fledged
>> straw-horse argument, it
>> does appear to me to be a cherry-picked argument to *attempt* to
>> refute. There are
>> much stronger arguments, both practical and philosophical, at any
>> attempt to elide
>> controversial content. Even as such, I am not convinced by the
>> argumentation, but
>> would not prefer to rebut an argument that does not address the
>> strongest reasons
>> for opposing elision of controversial content, by choice or otherwise.
>>
>
> My point was not to provide an argument for or against any particular
> implementation. It was a response to one particularly god-awful
> argument.
>

I honestly didn't intend to make a full rebuttal of your line of reasoning,
but I do feel you are forcing my hand a bit. So here goes.

"People who create photos or music or anything else and license it
[under a free licence] and the risk that someone they don’t like ends
up using “their” content. I wouldn’t be too pleased if I found that
one of the articles I’d written for Wikinews or one of the photos I’d
put on Commons turned up on websites affiliated with, say, the British
National Party. But that’s a risk I run from licensing stuff freely."

This is not a theoretical risk. This has happened. Most famously in
the case of Virgin using pictures of persons that were licenced under
a free licence, in their advertising campaign. I hesitate to call this
argument fatuous, but it's relevance is certainly highly
questionable. Nobody has raised this is as a serious argument except
you assume it
has been. This is the bit that truly is a straw horse. The "downstream
use" objection
was *never* about downstream use of _content_ but downstream use of _labels_ and
the structuring of the semantic data. That is a real horse of a
different colour, and not
of straw.

Here is the first installment of my rebuttal. I don't want to go the
tl;dr. route, so I'll chop it into easy chunks.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]