Re: Legal issues of banning

[Aiviet Nguyen <aiviet@cat.syr.edu>]

Hi Anh Ninh Tran,
  I think your questions are good. VNSA should not violate the US law.
However, the bannings  based on our game rules. You violates the game
rules ( like in football or volley balls) you are out. No question of 
democracy here. The rule of game is "NOT TALKING OF POLITICS". You can
form a forum with the rule that "NOT TALKING OF SEX" or ... only the question
that how many people wants to play the game.
  The admins should be faithful to their duty even they don't want
to make the game look not good by doing that. Anyway, banning here does not
mean censorship of the speech freedom. Mailing list means a group of people
agrees on exchanging mails on a certain topics with the predefined 
conditions. I suppose that I cannot bomb your mail account with something 
I don't like. In this case, we trusted the admins to filter the mails for us.
  
Cheers
Aiviet
PS: To the admins, I think we can discuss of the general rules.
    I suppose that I and Anh Ninh Tran are not talking of admins decisions.

On Fri, 7 Mar 1997, Ninh Tran wrote:

> 
> Dear admins and members of the VNSA forum,
> 
> Without discussing the contents issue regarding the violations of the   
> forum rules, I'm concerned with the legality of the recent bannings,   
> specially in the context of the laws of the host country in which the   
> matters are being conducted, in this case, the laws of the US. My   
> concerns regard the following issues:
> 
> 1. Whether VNSA is considered a private medium?
> 
> 2. Can a forum operating on a state-subsidized facility (the University   
> of Washington) disregard the laws of the state, and of the US?
> 
> 3. By the international nature of the Internet, which country has   
> jurisdiction over matters of concern.
> 
> I'm by no means a legal expert. Just a suggestion for a well-thought out   
> debate. I don't think there are precedents in these issues.
> 
> 
> 
>