At Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:17:04 -0700 (PDT),
Ole Jacobsen wrote:
On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Eric Rescorla wrote:
So, this isn't really that useful context for the rest of the
paragraph. To take the example of encryption, I think people
were arguing that it was a topic "regarding human rights".
With that said, it's not clear to me that saying "China's policy
of censoring the Internet sucks" isn't defamation.
I would say that this DOES border on defamation, BUT I am at a loss
to understand why such a statement would be a required part of our
technical discussion. The statement is an opinion about a topic which
there is a lot more that can be said, but like the baby said "this
isn't the venue." (Let's just say that it isn't well understood in
the west). "X policy sucks" sound like politics and not technology
particularly if X is a country.
Sure, but I've heard plenty of stuff like this said in the IETF,
indeed in this very discussion. So, while you may not think
that those are appropriate statements, ISTM that we do in fact
have a situation in which common IETF speech potentially runs
afoul of this restriction.
If on the other hand you were to say: "I am upset about the way
provider Y in country X does aggregation in BGP because this degrades
performance of..." you would have little to worry about beyond perhaps
a technical argument.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that this is in fact defamatory
speech within the legal sense that prevails in the US. (That doesn't
make it illegal in the US. First Amendment, etc.)
I'll rephrase my question then:
Is your claim that you believe that the contract would not be
found in a court of law to cover the described activities?
If by "activities" you mean "technical discussions" that are a normal
part of any IETF meeting, then yes.
In that case, can you please post your analysis of the other ORed parts
of the original clause that supports that conclusion?
-Ekr
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