Re: Defining the LDP, was; RE: HOWTO gatekeeper?

[Robert Kiesling <kiesling@mainmatter.com>]

rwschul@smart.net wrote:

[text omitted]

> If you have a gate keeper or do any filtering of information submitted
> by others, don't you incur a set of legal and ethical responsibilities
> kind of like an ISP that censors certain words/authors or whatever, as
> opposed to an AT&T that just provides bandwidth and never looks at
> content?
>
> So far all the howto's, guides, and FAQs have been relatively
> innocuous.  What happens when someone submits one that is
> intentionally destructive or pornographic or in some other way
> objectionable?
> 
> What kind of individual responsibility comes along with being a
> volunteer?  Can anyone who volunteers speak with authority for the
> LDP?  Is there any such thing as "authority" in the LDP?

This isn't the first time this question has come up.  Usually what
happens is that a commercial publisher wants to print LDP documents,
so they work with the coordinator(s) to determine which documents get
printed and which don't.  Each editor/publisher uses his or her own
set of criteria.  From my experience, an editor should look for
inaccurate, harmful, or out-of-date information, anything that might
cause the publisher to be held liable, like advertising or opinion;
get the text into a condition where it can be printed most
economically, and into a readable style (for my editing that means no
smileys .:| ).  For on-line distribution, the additional costs of an
extra document are negligible, and the liability incurred by the LDP
is next to nothing, given the usual disclaimers that most authors 
place in their documents.  This is from my own experience only;
if you asked another editor they would probably give you a different
answer.  But in publishing, the main goal is to make a book that
sells well, and most editorial agenda are geared towards that.

I hope I haven't raised more questions than I've tried to 
answer.

Robert 



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