[Air-l] copyright and ethics considerations

Christian Nelson cnelson at comm.umass.edu
Mon Sep 3 17:43:18 PDT 2001


Danyel Fisher wrote:

> > To throw in yet another wrench, do we need to worry about maintaining
> anonymity
> > when it is always entirely possible that the "John Smith" we are quoting
> could be
> > any one of a thousand John Smith's out in the cybergalaxy.
>
> A strange question, coming from Christian Nelson.
> http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=christian+nelson
>
> Your smiling mug pops up as the first hit on this particular search. Perhaps
> you (and Nancy Baym, and I, for that matter) are pareticularly priveleged.

I'm not sure how priveledged I am to have a really bad picture of me on the net.
Whatever the case, I do think that we're in a distinct minority. Nevertheless,
it is certainly true that some people are more anonymous than others on the net.
Then again, doesn't the fact that people can create E-mail messages with other
peoples' E-mail addresses in the "from" line mean that the Internet always
preserves "plausible deniability" (to borrow a phrase from Ollie North and
company)?

> ("Um, it came from my email, but really, that two year discussion about the
> kinky sex with the researcher HAD to be an intruder!"). This one seems fairly
> straightforward, to me: it is easy to generate more identities, but fairly
> hard to steal others'.

But it is possible, no?

--Christian
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