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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Group Purhase Ethics & Barry Diament's Hip Joints posted by Wellfed on October 24, 2004 at 18:52:49:
Ooof. What a thread.From time to time, we have to figure out how the Asylum's rules apply in a "gray area." Not that long ago, there was considerable controversy in the hi-rez highway about the presence and heavy posting by a number of individuals who were in the business of modifying SACD players. While these folks were contributing a lot to the discussion, in some cases, some inmates felt that the "contribution" spilled over into self-promotion. With some fine-tuning, dialog and, I believe, the considerable good will of all involved, the situation seems to have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
It seems to me that the organization of a group purchase of a product, even a finished product, is "commercial," regardless of the circumstances. Even a group that wants to get a better price on a particular component has a "commercial" motive; they want to save money. It might seem innocuous when a group wants to buy some expensive capacitors and get a discount. But, analytically, how is that different than if we were to try and organize a group of 500 audiophiles to contract with, say, a loudspeaker manufacturer to build and sell direct to us a loudspeaker made to our specifications?
So, the easy thing is to establish a bright line and just say we're not going to do that. Trying to fine-tune the distinction to acommodate "special cases" is just going to produce headaches for the Bored and the moderators.
The subject of this particular thread raises intellectual property issues, which, it seems to me, just gives us a further reason to want to keep our distance from it. Do we really want to pay a lawyer (or impose on the time of a qualified volunteer lawyer) to give us a legal opinion as to whether or not the use of AA's facilities to organize a group purchase of a custom-made product that infringes on someone else's patent is contributory infringement that subjects AA to liablity? I don't think so. (And, I'm assuming only for the purpose of the discussion that there is an infringement here. I have no idea whether there is or is not.) That puts a big risk on AA for which it is not compensated.
Finally, somewhere down in the thread, someone has said that AA owns the copyright to posted materials. That is not correct. AA makes no claim of ownership with respect to the content of posts. Some sites that have "audience participation" (like product review sites) do this. We don't. We do claim, that as a condition for posting, you give AA a non-exclusive license to use the content of your posts including sub-licensing them out to someone else to use and that you give other users of the site a non-exclusive license to use your posts on this site. Many other "consumer feedback" sites do this as well.
The reason that we have this set up this way is that AA is not responsible for the content of the posts. As you all know, posts are not screened before they go up; and the moderators do not and can not review every post made on every board.
AA asserts copyright ownership for its own, original material on the site (like the "Content Rules") and for the "look and feel" of the site, but not for the content of the posts.
I hope this helps clarify things.
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Follow Ups
- Re: Group Purhase Ethics & Barry Diament's Hip Joints - Bruce from DC 11:03:19 10/29/04 (1)
- Thanks Bruce... - Wellfed 13:05:04 10/29/04 (0)
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