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

Thu Dec 1 22:58:36 UTC 2011

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
> 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?

No, just to keep the facts straight, you were not making an analogy, you
were comparing apples with oranges. Even the sheerest imitation of your
argument being an analogy breaks down when you consider that in fact
for it to stand to scrutiny, you would have to believe that looking at
at something, and looking at something and making your mind up over
what it was you were looking at are the same thing. Which of course they
are *not*.

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