Copyright Infrigement, Tickets & the Writeoff

[Joubert[$]]

Something sinister is brewing. I can almost taste its evil.

How does one remove or otherwise delete a post that causes one to be ticketed? Would Epinions start blowing away accounts instead of dogs since they couldn't leave the ticket up? And if that was the case, wouldn't the URLs of prolific authors in the search engines lead to pages saying that the review can't be displayed?

Crimminy, wouldn't that be the ultimate insult? Picture thousands and thousands of URLs that couldn't display because the member was ticketed. People would simply say, "Oh, that's another one of those Epinion URLs. They all lead to dead pages."

Think about the non-member hits. There are hundreds of thousands. And so many would simply lead to dead pages.

Of course, with editing functionality restored, we could simply remove the offending Epinion that caused the ticket in the first place and all would be well with the world.

[Sordid-1]

That's a truly awful thought, George.

I would absolutely HATE to see such a thing happen. Here Epinions makes these site improvements with such good intentions to aid us, the very, very, very HIGHLY VALUED members, and THOSE VERY IMPROVEMENTS could end up having detrimental effects on their business and reputation.

Gosh, maybe they'd just be better off restoring the edit/delete functionality. I know it was lovingly implemented for the sole purpose of protecting us from ourselves with no ulterior motive or intellectual property ramifications, but, golly, I guess I'd be willing to take the risk of being responsible for my own writing which I own rather than having my wise big brother safeguard it for me.

[pluckyduck]

Geeze, that thought never even occurred to me.



Hmmmm, you mean Epinions has to choose between:

1) Letting offending reviews stand highly placed in prominent product categories

2) Deleting same Epinions by themselves and risk legally becoming publishers (something they've never been willing to risk before)

3) Finding a reason to delete entire accounts (thereby robbing themselves of all of the content that they went out of their way to "protect")

4) Or restoring the edit/delete function so writers can make their own choice to delete the W/O Epinions?


Man, I never thought about it that way.



Andrea

[Workingmomof2]

Wait - let me get this straight. So you're saying that if they don't reverse the no-delete policy, they will be left with all these highly rated off-topic product reviews in high-profile product areas?

And if they delete the reviews, or members, they'll end up with bad URL's?

And if they let the reviews stand, the site content would be devalued overall?

And come to think of it, wouldn't the site content overall be far less valuable if people can't edit and delete out of date or inaccurate reviews? Or add in important safety information, edit titles, etc?

Wow - that would truly suck. It sure would make it hard to keep investors happy, wouldn't it? Doesn't demonstrate a very solid business model, pissing off all their top writers like that, does it?

It just seems like it would be so much simpler to admit that it was a big mistake, reverse the policy IMMEDIATELY and go in and delete all of the EBD reviews, wouldn't it? I mean, Ken did say that when the edit/delete functions were reinstated the reviews WOULD be deleted, so I think everyone is agreeing to that condition by default.

Huh. I never thought of it that way. The phrase "sucks to be them" comes to mind somehow...

[Sordid-1]

Golly, Amy, you've opened up some big old cans of worms.

It seems like quite a conundrum.

Let me see if I have this straight.

Here on one hand, they could leave the reviews up in plain sight, but do they really want hundreds of pieces in high profile areas gathering lots of traffic that tells the readers that they blow dog. And when you think about it, it could be anyone hitting those pieces. It could be potential consumers. It could be venture capitalists. It could be their advertising partners coming to check up on their investment. It could be POTENTIAL advertising partners checking out a possible venue to display their ads. Heck, worse yet, someone could e-mail these insidious things to all their strategic partners and advertising customers. That'd be bad.

Of course, they could take all those goshdarned reviews down. But I guess in that process they would flush their "we are a platform, not a publisher" policy straight down the toilet. If they suddenly became a "publisher", wouldn't that make them responsible for the content? Wouldn't that mean that they would have liability for what is "published" here? Gosh, that could cause some sticky messes. In the past, they have refused to remove awful, potentially damaging content proudly standing by their "we are a platform" policy. They have refused to remove content advocating violence and child endangerment, and many, many more bad things. If one of those articles ended up directly resulting in a criminal act, wouldn't they be subject to civil lawsuits and potentially devastating court actions? I guess they'd really have to buckle down and monitor their content to prevent that from happening! Do they have the staff to handle that? Can they afford the staff to handle that?

Of course, they could always just delete the memberships of everyone who posted this off-topic dreck of questionable taste. But, gosh, wouldn't that cause even more dissent (is that possible?) and lead to a boatload of blind links in search engine results? Wouldn't surfers get sick of seeing those 404 errors and just ignore all Epinions links? I bet the there are over 10,000 reviews written by the people in this ridiculous EBD thing. Wouldn't Epinions become known as "the dumbasses who waste my time with all the blind links"? Would that annoy Google and Lycos?

Crikey, Amy! This may be worse than I thought!

Oh, I guess they could just restore the "edit/delete" functionality. But they'd just be buckling down to the "peons" then. Excuse me, I mean the "highly valued" members. I get confused about Epinion-speak sometimes.

[29th_Candidate]

:::sniffle:::

YEAH! Breaks mah heart... How will Uncle Sordy ever fulfill his wildly unrealistic aspiration to steal my title as Epinions' "KING O' SCADS" (i.e., shortened from: Worldwide Uncontested King Of Any And All Scads Of Helpful Product Info Calculated To Help The Consumer Make Better Buying Decisions, but it is beneath my royal dignity to brag about such things...)

29th_Scads'R'Us

In my case, who cares?
They can have their piddly account.
Just not my writing. I own that.

[jkkelley]

Originally posted by Sordid-1
Oh, I guess they could just restore the "edit/delete" functionality. But they'd just be buckling down to the "peons" then. Excuse me, I mean the "highly valued" members. I get confused about Epinion-speak sometimes.

...that's "Mr. Peon" to you. Even though Epinions has gone the way of questionably bestial sex practices, titles earned solely through an Epiniodissing (such as, for example, Advisor in "How to Masturbate with Action Figures and Sets") should remain valid (even if we invented them ourselves). I can still give Peonesse to anyone who really needs it, and I will not let Epinions suck all the value out of it.

Oh, wait a minute.... I'm a human. I'm not at risk anyway.

You know, it's interesting doing this. Do you realize the degree to which you are proving a disciple of the great, lamented Saul Alinsky, whether you've heard of him or not? (He's one of my heroes.)

jk

[kurt_messick]

Rather interesting. Is anyone tracking all the Dog-write-off epinions so that one might visit them easily, without surfing too much? Don't want to increase Epinions' page count unnecessarily now, do we?

I wondered about the search-enging dilemma too. I wonder what will happen. Epinions has some hard choices to make. It will be interesting to watch...

[Joubert[$]]

Originally posted by kurt_messick
Rather interesting. Is anyone tracking all the Dog-write-off epinions so that one might visit them easily, without surfing too much?

Sordid has a list on his profile page.