Re: "purity" package

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:

First of all, I'd like to say that though I'm always going to be
uneasy when people set themselves toward deciding what's "obscene" for
others, I'm not claiming that there isn't a line to be drawn here.
It's just that it's a really dangerous thing to do.  If we end up
having a /usr/share/books, do we exclude "Lady Chatterly's (sp?)
Lover", or how about "Inherit the Wind", Nark Twain, or that somewhat
controversial book by Rushdie?

On the other hand, if someone were to package up a bunch of pictures
of people having sex, and were to upload them as
graphics/nifty-backgrounds-1.1 or something, I agree that we as a
distribution (personally I'd just ignore it) would have a problem.
And if this example doesn't convince you, use your imagination; I'm
sure you can come up with something much worse that you'd concede
*would* be a problem.

> Well, it has some *very* explicit things in it.  It is very
> outlandish.

Well, I looked through the 400 question "explicit" test and I've seen
much worse.  There's a bunch of stuff in there that I consider
uninteresting, but if it's not taking advantage of someone against
their will or before they're old enough, I couldn't care less.  (read
the rest of this messag before jumping on me about the "what if minors
get hold of this" issue -- I agree, that *is* an issue).

> 1) Legal problems related to distributing these sorts of "adult"
>    materials.

I can't speak to this since I'm not a lawyer.  But of course, if this
sort of thing endagers the distribution, it'll have to go.  For the
most part, though, I think most of the relevant laws here are
extremely stupid.  I'd prefer that countries that are so tied up about
who's seeing who nude would spend more of that effort making sure all
of our children are fed, healthy, and educated, but I suppose that's a
different issue.

> 2) Legal problems related to distributing versions of posts to Usenet,
>    some lacking explicit copyright notices, without the author's
>    permission.  This would suggest that, at a minimum, the package
>    shouldn't be in main.

Sounds like non-free's the place for it to go, but that doesn't solve
the broader issue.  I can definitely see how we might need some
protection wrt "exposure to minors".  This could be solved by package
"keywords" or some similar mechanism.  Of course this would only work
if the mirroring and dpkg-ftp tools knew about the keywords.  Making a
separate "mature" tree at the level of main, contrib, non-free would
be a less elegant solution, but has the advantage of making it easy
for CD distributors to exclude.

> 3) Public relations problems once people see that we are distributing
>    that sort of thing.  There are a lot of people using Linux that are
>    minors and this puts us in questionable legal situation in the US.
>    And that doesn't even begin to touch what the parents of these
>    people may think about it.  We could face a PR nightmare here.

I'm not saying this isn't a big issue, but if you're going to start
worrying about that, then you better get ready for a whole mess of
other problems.  For example, none of our web-browsers or news readers
have any kind of filtering, so as soon as the kid gets online and
subscribes to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*, they'll have a source
of far more "obscene" material.  I know it's not the same as having
the stuff on our ftp site, but I'm not sure the parents will
necessarily make that distinction.

> Rob, what do you think of this in light of the above points?  I in
> particular find it appaling to force CD vendors to distribute smut if
> they want to distribute our official CD.

See my answer to point 2.  I agree that having a "mature" distribution
would make this problem easier to deal with.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94  53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30


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