In light of the recent Australian hotrodding forum takedown, it makes sense to address the legal issues surrounding forum administration, and to describe how they specifically relate to automotive tech forums. In dealing with the situation, we learned a lot from lawyers and national legal organizations that specialize in protecting freedom of speech online. Hopefully, by generating discussion, we can help to prevent something like this from happening again.

Three common legal issues on the web today are privacy, defamation, and copyright. Let's look at how these three issues apply to online automotive communities.


PRIVACY/ANONYMITY
Many users of online communities prefer to register using a pseudonym. This allows them a freedom of expression that might not be possible in their everyday offline lives, and enables them to maintain a sense of separation between their online and offline personas. While the US Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment, the internet has not yet matured sufficiently to provide adequate case law to harden this position. Regardless, this would have little effect on non-American forums. In the case of the Australian hotrodding forum takedown, the forum administrator was pressured to provide the offline identities of several forum users. When he refused, legal action was brought against him.

More information on online privacy:
Electronic Privacy Information Center
John Doe Anonymity FAQ
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
Privacy International
EFF Privacy Information


DEFAMATION
Anyone who has spent a good amount of time in an online community has witnessed accusations of defamation or, specifically "libel". Unfortunately, the traditional definition of defamation was designed to be applied to offline methods of communication. In an online environment, traditional offline terms such as "writer", "publisher", and "public" take on varying meanings that blur the definition of defamation. Also, people are often speaking under online pseudonyms. When their speech is defamatory, should an administrator be pressured to provide information about them?

When it comes to responsibility for online speech, it stands to reason that people should each be individually responsible for their own words, and that a forum administrator shouldn't be held liable for comments posted by users. In America, the law states that: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Although this provides somewhat of a separation between user and administrator, many countries lack a similar mechanism. In the situation involving the Australian hotrodding forum, their administrator was held responsible for "defamatory" comments made by forum users.

More information on online defamation:
Can the host of a message board be held liable?
Protest, Parody, and Criticism FAQ
Communications Decency Act


COPYRIGHT
The greatest legal battles brewing on the net today are those involving intellectual freedom. Considering the popularity of topics such as copyright, fair use, and intellectual property, administrators of online communities are likely to encounter them eventually.

The application of these concepts to online automotive communities raises three distinct concerns:

• posting of copyrighted content by users
• re-purposing of content authored by users
• distinguishing technical data from copyrightable creative works

Most active online automotive communities contain various posts in which copyrighted material is illegally reproduced, even despite a potential "fair use" defense. This includes copy-pasted text from other websites, or information from offline sources such as print articles or books. Prior to the hardening of online copyright legislation, some websites were even scanning in articles from common offline hotrodding publications, converting them into downloadable PDF's, and selling them from their websites for profit.

Despite the occasional posting of copyrighted works, an even greater concern is the handling of user-submitted content. When a member of an online community posts information on a forum, how should that information be handled with respect to copyright and intellectual freedom? To limit a website's liability, many standard user-registration forms disclaim responsibility for user-submitted content. While this may provide some protection to operators of online communities, it seems to hinder their right to re-purpose the user-submitted content. For example, what if a forum administrator would like to refine a user's specific post, and convert it into an "article", for publication on the website? The tactic of disclaiming content should be balanced with the need to handle that content for additional publication and distribution.

Finally, online automotive communities face a unique challenge related to the nature of the knowledge that they're exchanging. Much automotive information is technical "fact" -- numbers, specifications, figures, etc. While facts themselves are not copyrightable, collections of facts can be, sometimes. In the world of online automotive tech information, where do single facts become copyrightable collections?

More information on copyright:
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: Copyright
Center for the Public Domain
Creative Commons
Fair Use Project
EFF Intellectual Propertly Online
Public Knowledge
Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center
Feist v. Rural

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Online communication is reshaping social and legal standards that have been in place for thousands of years. As new knowledge-sharing practices emerge, their users are encountering resistance from traditional proponents of outdated methods of communication.

Automotive online communities contain especially large amounts of previously ungathered knowledge. As the takedown of the Australian hotrodding forum demonstrated, this knowledge can easily become the victim of an untested online legal environment.

In an effort to protect the free exchange of knowledge in automotive forums, the Crankshaft Coalition will be investigating the effects of the application of cyberlaw to online automotive communities. Our goal is to gather information, make reasonable analyses, and ultimately publish a series of recommendations and "best practices" for automotive knowledge-sharing communities.

If you have ideas or comments relating to legal issues facing webmasters of online automotive communities, please add them to this thread. Or, if you're interested in cyberlaw or online freedom of communication, please feel free to post in our Freedom of Information forum.

That seems to be a clear-cut case requiring the permission of the user, unless that refinement actually resulted in a new work that used the ideas from the original post. Expressions of ideas are copyrightable; ideas are not.

I don't think users would like a policy that allowed editing without specific approval beyond filters revealed in guidelines. Such limited editing as obscenity filters appears to be acceptable to many.

However, people do want attribution for their words, even if it is by way of a pseudonym. This works in the administrator's favor in obtaining permission from a user to make a specific post more prominently featured, on the condition of some editing.

Bear in mind that a lot of this is affected by the "membership agreement" that members "sign" upon registering. Many forums indicate that content posted becomes the "property" of the website, etc.

This is not to say that such a practice is necessarily ethical. However, in reviewing information for our new Knowledge Base, I certainly saw a lot of cut-and-pasting techniques to convert member posts into a more static, article-like form of information. Some forums "disclaim" all of their content, for the purpose of mitigating liability if a member has violated someone else's copyright.

I also saw a lot of scanned-in information. I'm familiar with the public domain rules, but I can't imagine that the majority of webmasters are. Also, while scanning-in an article may be violative, how about scanning in a chart, list, or diagram? There's a very nebulous distinction between facts and "expressions of ideas" when it comes to technical automotive information. And, a similarly confusing line between facts, and "collections" of facts. For example, are Hollander interchange manuals copyrightable? From the Feist case, we know that phone books are not copyrightable. And, we know that articles ARE copyrightable. Hollander manuals (or similar pieces of information) lie somewhere in-between. But on which side do they fall?