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

Thu Dec 1 19:06:50 UTC 2011

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 09:11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the
general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might
reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do
quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world
that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that
(your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more
efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens?

I'm not at all sure how you concluded that I was suggesting filtering
groups would be reusing the content? Net Nanny doesn't generally need
to include copies of Autofellatio6.jpg in their software. The reuse of
the filtering category tree, or even the unstructured user data, is
something anti-filter folk have been concerned about. But for the most
part, if a category tree were built for filtering, it wouldn't require
much more than identifying clusters of categories within Commons. That
is the point of my post. If you want to find adult content to filter,
it's pretty damn easy to do: you can co-opt the existing extremely
detailed category system on Commons ("Nude images including Muppets",
anybody?).

Worrying that filtering companies will co-opt a new system when the
existing system gets them 99% of the way anyway seems just a little
overblown.

> It isn' one incidence, it isn't a class of incidences. Take it on board that
> the community is against the *principle* of censorship. Please.

As I said in the post, there may still be good arguments against
filtering. The issue of principle may be very strong - and Kim Bruning
made the point about the ALA definition, for instance, which is a
principled rather than consequentialist objection.

Generally, though, I don't particularly care *what* people think, I
care *why* they think it. This is why the debate over this has been so
unenlightening, because the arguments haven't actually flowed, just
lots of emotion and anger.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>