[Air-l] copyright and ethics considerations

[Christian Nelson]

Nancy Baym wrote:

> This raises for me an interesting aspect to the ethics struggle, which is that
> if something is copyrighted, we OWE it to the author to give full credit, which
> comes up against research ethic traditions of hiding identities of subjects
> when studying online discussion. I struggled with this with some of the more
> creative posts I quoted in my work and erred on the side of anonymity over
> credit. Nancy.

I wonder to what extent any anonymity can be provided anything on the Net, at
least anything that has words which a researcher quotes at all accurately. All
anyone has to do is plug quoted material into a search engine and, voila, there's
the E-mail, or the home page, or whatever.

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. This kinda reminds me
of when Paula Jones claimed that she was forced to come forward with her
allegations because her "name" came up in an article regarding Clinton's sexual
escapades as Arkansas's governor. As you may recall, the article only referred to
a Paula in Little Rock. For pete's sake, isn't there more than one Paula in
Arkansas? How could she claim that her anonymity had been breached? In the same
way, how could we breach a subject's anonymity by citing even their full name
when it is (usually) not attached to any locale, etc. and therefore could apply
to thousands of persons?

Along these same lines, one of the things that has been noted about the Internet
is that it allows people to hide their true identities and take on new ones--even
other peoples' real identities. How can we breach someone's anonymity by simply
citing their name when anyone can sign any name to an E-mail with complete
impunity--i.e., when someone can deny they were a researcher's subject by simply
claiming that the researcher quoted an E-mail by someone who illegitimately used
the name in question?

I don't mean these questions to be taken as rhetorical--I'm not sure that they
have obvious answers, nor do I think I have the answers, but I think these things
are worth considering in the discussions so far.

--Christian