prince.org staff blog

In an effort to bring some sort of reasoning behind one of our most misunderstood or misconstrued actions, the following should be noted:

Moderation is a process. We need to balance many things when we consider any action taken on a member’s account. Questions we ask ourselves… like, is this being done maliciously? Is it a joke? Can people tell it’s a joke? Have they done this with full knowledge of the rules? Etc.

Some things tend to tread the line of what’s allowed and what’s not. In this case… Alternate Accounts. As stated by Ben, no person may have more than one account active at any one time on the Org. Some people feel the need to create two, three or even more Alternate Accounts than that. We know that most are harmless and most likely utilize this ability to do so to get around the posting limits. Some use them as different personalities. Occasionally we get someone who uses them to harass or post things that shouldn’t be posted. Some are used to troll or bait. Others create Alt Accts to get around being temp banned or permabanned. Some are used to create a “celebrity account” so that they can partake in discussions as that famous person. We know if (for example) Morris Day were going to create an account here, it most likely would not be created as “MorrisDay” with his picture used as an avatar.

Rest assured, we know this is happening and know who the Orgers are. So, why do we allow this to continue when it’s clearly against Ben’s wishes? Most “Alt Accts” are harmless. We take that into consideration and moderate them accordingly.

We, as Moderators, reserve the right to ban any Alt Acct at our discretion – simply for existing. Again, it is against Ben’s wishes.

Not too long ago we had a crop of politically minded Alt Accts pop up to make fun of, or bait/slam the candidates and/or the people who supported them. We discussed their existence amongst ourselves and came up with the decision to delete them all, as it wasn’t worth the effort to continually have to moderate them. We knew they were Alt Accts, and we knew they weren’t the primary accounts of the Orgers who used them. So we took them out of the equation.

So what does all this mean? Here’s a quick break down:

* Alt Accts are not allowed.
* We can/will delete them if/when we’re alerted to wrong-doings from an Alt Acct.
* We could let them continue until other more serious rules are broken under the guise of the Alt Acct.
* This includes Alt Accts in the ChatRoom as well.
* Alt Accts created to get around a temp ban or permaban will be deleted immediately.
* As always, Moderators have final say on any deletions of Alternative Accounts without expectation of an explanation.

Thank you,

June7 on behalf of TheModSquad

Hi guys, while dealing with the various issues around WebSheriff etc., I came across this pretty interesting article from last weekend’s Washington Post… check it out! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR2007101802453.html

Here’s a small excerpt–but there is much more in the full article:

But recently — in part because of backlash among users and advocacy groups who say copyright holders are abusing the law and wrongfully taking down content — the challenges to these copyright claims also appear to be increasing.

“These companies are trying to shoot a mouse with an elephant gun,” said Gigi Sohn, director of Public Knowledge, a public-policy think tank that focuses on intellectual property. “They like to accuse their customers, the music fans and TV fans out there, of not respecting the law, but I don’t think they respect the law.”

We feel the same way, especially with the sloppiness of WebSheriff’s slapdash and ridiculously broad DMCA request. I hadn’t thought of actually suing them over it, but now that I see some folks are going for it, it’s something to consider. Interesting stuff!

Hi all… some of you may be aware of the WebSheriff stuff going on, which has affected most of the big Prince fan sites, with each getting a DMCA infringement notice. Basically, this is a letter from an authorized agent of Prince, saying that something on the site infringes his copyright, and must be removed. The interesting thing is that, as part of the DMCA law in the USA, the letter is sent to the service provider, not the site owner directly. So for example, the company that we rent servers from, got the letter and passed it along to us. The letter basically stated (I will include more details later), that there were ~3,500 images in our ‘gallery’ section, that infringed Prince’s copyrights, trademark, or other intellectual property. The way the DMCA notice works, is that the site owner has two choices: 1. take the material down, or 2. file a counter notice to say the material is not infringing, and that they accept being sued within 14 days.

Now, there’s no way that all the images we were asked to remove were infringing–it included images of people’s tattoos, their cars, scans from books that had nothing to do with Prince, newspaper clippings, wire image bureau images, etc. Lots of stuff which might be copyrighted, or not, but certainly, images and images of items, that Prince does not own the rights to (under the DMCA, the rights owner of the specific item being asked to be removed must file the complaint). There were also other problems with the specifics of the request that lead us at prince.org to believe it’s invalid, and we’re following up on that angle as well. Put simply, we believe this to be a bogus, incomplete, and certainly overly broad, even fairly sloppy, request. (In this article I don’t want to get into the “is this fair” or “why is Prince doing this” issues; that’s the topic for another day, and another message.)

That said, you may be surprised to learn that I have decided to temporarily make these images unavailable, nearly 3,500 of them. I would prefer not to, of course, and believe there is no legitimate reason why I should… but this is a purely practical matter. Our service provider, the good people (really!) we rent servers from, aren’t legally in a position to debate the correctness of each image and the request–this isn’t their primary role. They will simply take the ’safe’ road and shut down our server (or something similar, with the same effect) unless we remove them, or else they become liable to be sued. The DMCA is imbalanced in this regard, but this is the reality (remember, this was enacted by the same people who brought you the Patriot Act!) So, essentially, I’ve disabled access to these images so that while prince.org can secure a thorough legal analysis, we aren’t shut down. After all, the image gallery is a small part of the site, and I wouldn’t want to risk having the chat and forums go offline while we wrangle over this… there is principle, and honor, involved here, but this site exists to serve you, the community visitor and site member, and if we’re offline we’re not serving anyone, no pun intended

So, that’s the quick update… there’s fewer images in the gallery right now, but they’re not gone, we’re just working through legal silliness. The site will continue to run and provide the unofficial, semi-random, relatively unfettered and hopefully entertaining discussions it always has. Watch the staff blog for continuing updates…

[Edited to fix the grammar on the title... feh! -Ben]