Re: Posting from work/university addresses

Ian Lance Taylor
2007-08-06T14:04:55Z

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > Cc: gdb@sourceware.org, dewar@adacore.com, b07584@freescale.com, rgetz@blackfin.uclinux.org, jimb@codesourcery.com
> > From: Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>
> > Date: 04 Aug 2007 11:32:44 -0700
> >
> > As far as I can tell, you are requesting that we not do anything dumb,
>
> No, that's not it. My problem is that I don't see the motivation for
> rejecting such messages spelled out anywhere. The URL you mentioned
> _advises_ to do something, but, AFAIU, there's some policy issues
> involved here, which are not explained anywhere.

The reason we would like to block the disclaimers is that they impose
a legal liability on us. The problematic disclaimers are the ones
which say something along the lines of "If you are not the intended
recipient you must not disseminate, copy .... We request that you
notify COMPANYNAME immediately." The problem is that we can not obey
those instructions, as we automatically archive the e-mail message and
make it available for anybody in the world to see. Since we are
violating the terms of the disclaimer, the sender has reasonable
grounds to sue us. It is likely that the suit would not prevail in
the end, as my understanding is that the disclaimers are unenforceable
under U.S. law, but that does not matter since we are a volunteer
organization with no means to defend ourselves. I think it is very
unwise to leave ourselves open to this sort of legal liability. This
is of course a personal issue for me since as one of the
administrators of gcc.gnu.org/sourceware.org, and the owner of the
domain name sourceware.org, I would be personally named in the
lawsuit.

This may seem rather farfetched to you, but just in this year I have
received two threatening legal letters concerning sourceware.org on
other issues. I was able to defuse both issues (one concerning
defamatory spam e-mail we had archived, one concerning the use of
software downloaded from sourceware.org in a contract dispute), but I
have a strong personal interest in defusing these issues before they
arise.

If there were a reason to accept those e-mail messages, then I would
have a different opinion on the matter. But I see no reason that we
should accept them. They are infrequent and relatively easy to avoid.
I know of only one case of a person who was required to use those
disclaimers and was prohibited from using web-based e-mail accounts at
work. I am willing to sacrifice one potential contributor for this
issue.

Note that EU law does not require anything along the lines of "If you
are not the intended recipient....". We have no problem with adding
company identification information to e-mail messages. Many people do
this even within the U.S.

> > we're free software volunteers just like you. We're on your side.
> > We won't do anything dumb.
>
> Isn't this a matter of policy of Red Hat (or some other organization)?
> I do trust you, but I don't know about organizations.

No, this has nothing to do with Red Hat or any other organization.
Neither Chris nor I work for Red Hat.

Ian