General Interest > The Melting Pot

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Froderik:

Ursus:
Aside @Froderik: Ha ha. I take it that said unit is allegedly 227 millimeters in length?  :D

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The 228 Massacre

From Wikipedia:

The 228 Incident, also known as the 228 Massacre, was an anti-government uprising in Taiwan that began on February 27, 1947 and was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang  (KMT) government. Estimates of the number of deaths vary from ten thousand to thirty thousand or more.[1][2]  The Incident marked the beginning of the Kuomintang's White Terror period in Taiwan, in which thousands more Taiwanese vanished, were killed, or imprisoned. The number "228" refers to the day the massacre began: February 28, or 02-28.[/list]
 
See also: http://www.taiwandc.org/228-intr.htm

From the inside cover of George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed (1965, Houghton Mifflin):

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Formosans, despite the Cairo Declaration, hoped for a guaranteed neutrality under American or international trusteeship. Instead, they were delivered over to another and more oppressive occupation.

Their prosperous society was invaded by a horde of mainland Chinese, often brutal, ignorant, and greedy -- the dregs of the Nationalist army. The new governor, under orders, bled the island dry, ruthlessly and with dispatch.

Yet still the Formosans hoped. American propaganda, promising freedom to all oppressed peoples, and citing the glorious Revolution of 1776, continued to pour in upon them. In February 1947 unarmed Formosans rose en masse to demand reforms in the administration at Taipei. Chiang Kai-shek's answer was a brutal massacre. Thousands died -- first among them were the leaders who had asked for American help. Washington turned a deaf ear, while the Chinese communists rejoiced.

After Chiang's military collapse and retreat to Formosa the situation became even worse. As American emotional commitment to Chiang became more fervent, Formosan hope for American or United Nations intervention or understanding faded and died.[/list]

Troll Control:
Mmmmmmmmmmmm...229

Ursus:
This one oughta be relevant to 1st Amendment aficionados here.

A Purdue student is discussed with some vitriol in a local newspapers comments section and consequently sues said publisher, charging libel and false light claims along with attendant emotional distress.

This from Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog:

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April 05, 2010
230 Protects Newspaper from Liability for Reader Comments--Collins v. Purdue

By Eric Goldman

Collins v. Purdue University, 2010 WL 1250916 (N.D. Ind. March 24, 2010)

The plaintiff, Timothy J. Collins, III, is a Purdue student. The defendant in this ruling is Federated Publications, which publishes a Lafayette, Indiana daily newspaper, the Journal & Courier.

On Jan. 13, 2007, Collins was assaulted on campus and sought hospital treatment. Separately, another Purdue student, Wade Steffey, was reported missing and last seen on Jan. 12. (Months later, Steffey was discovered dead on campus--as far as I can tell, his death still has not been satisfactorily explained).

In mid-January, the police started investigating Collins in connection with Steffey's disappearance. On Feb. 5, the police charged Collins with "False Informing" for alleged misinformation Collins had provided to the police. On Feb. 10, the Journal & Courier reported on Collins' Feb. 5 charges in an article, "Student Who Reported Mugging Charged," published both online and off. The article led some readers to infer that Collins was involved in Steffey's disappearance, a topic explored in the online article's "vitriolic and hateful" user comments. The court recaps that "The posting of these readers' comments fueled the suspicious, charged atmosphere on campus at that time and inflamed the frenzied efforts to unravel the Steffey mystery."

This opinion doesn't explicitly say why Collins is on a litigation tear, but I infer that Collins believes he was improperly linked to the Steffey disappearance and was subjected to some harsh treatment by those who made that link. In this ruling, Federated Publications seeks to exit his lawsuit (although many other defendants are left).

Federated defends Collins' libel and false light claims on 47 USC 230, saying part of his claims are based on third party comments. Collins responded that the newspaper website doesn't qualify as a provider/user of an interactive computer service, an argument that goes nowhere. Instead, the court treats this as easy case (which it is):

Federated can be held liable for defamatory statements in its own material published on the website-such as the article if the article was defamatory-but cannot be held liable for the publication of remarks or postings by third parties. Like the defendant in Dimeo, Federated did not create or develop the posted comments and cannot be held responsible for them. Also like Dimeo, none of the facts before the court show any encouragement by Federated for readers to comment on the website articles in a defamatory way. Moreover, Collins has made no assertions in either his First Amended Complaint or his response briefs suggesting that Federated engaged in any of the revisions or redrafting discussed in Nemet or applied any editorial function whatsoever over the comments posted by the readers on its website. Collins himself titles these counts in his First Amended Complaint as "reader comments," making them unattributable to Federated. Because Federated is immune from liability for the third-party content posted on its website by the CDA, Collins' claims charging Federated with liability for the third-party postings on its website fail.[/list]

To get around this, Collins tried an "inducement" style attack on 230, but the court rejected that as well:

Federated did nothing to induce any readers to post a commentary on the article nor to express a preference for a particular viewpoint in the posts. Nowhere in Collins' Amended Complaint is the assertion that Federated chose the particularly hateful and denigrating posts over a batch of kinder, gentler comments. Nor does Collins suggest that any of Federated's staff writers or editors were responsible for the particular posts or their content. To the contrary, Collins has identified these posts on the website as "reader comments" or "reader posts", and taking Collins at his word, Federated cannot be liable for the statements made by these third-parties.[/list]

Note that 230 should have applied even if Federated had done some of these things--especially making editorial judgments about user comments--but the court didn't need to be more precise because Collins' argument failed on the facts he was working with. So in the end, this is an easy 230 case holding that the newspaper isn't liable for the online user comments.

The newspaper wins on other grounds too. The emotional distress claims were dismissed because the newspaper article was not outrageous or published with the requisite scienter; the libel and false light claims were dismissed because of the veracity of the story's exact words; and the statute of limitations also applied.

_______________________________________________
Posted by Eric at April 5, 2010 03:16 PM | Content Regulation , Derivative Liability

Ursus:
Pacific 231 by Artur Honegger
Utah Symphony Orchestra; Maurice Abravanel, conductor[/list]

YouTube clip Description:
In 1923, steam locomotives, the height of modern technology, were fast and exciting. Although airplanes were newer, and automobiles and roads were quickly improving, steam was still the prime mover of high-speed transport. The excitement of seeing a huge working locomotive flash by spewing steam, smoke and cinders is hard to describe. Their eerie whistles were at once frightening and exhilarating. Trains were a symbol of technology improving people's lives, of the hope for an exciting new future. This is especially poignant so soon after World War I, where technology was used to create previously unimagined horrors. The Music: The 1923 Mouvement Symphonique "Pacific 231" of Arthur Honegger is the driving force behind this video. The video's visual elements are collected from many sources, and are added to the music so that those who've never experienced the sheer power and awesome speed of steam might have some notion of what the composer saw.[/list]

Selected material (introduction):

Pacific 231 =
Pacific type locomotive
2 guide wheels
3 driver wheels
1 trailing wheel[/list][/list]
In 1923, Artur Honegger wrote: "I have always had a passionate love for locomotives. To me they are living things and I love them.... That which I have endeavored to portray in Pacific 231 is not an imitation of the noises of the locomotive, but the translation into music of the visual impressions and the physical sensation of it.... Its point of departure is an objective contemplation: the quiet respiration of an engine in repose; the effort in starting; the progressive increase of speed, passing from the static to the dynamic state of an engine of 300 tons driven in the night at a speed of 120 miles per hour. As a subject I have taken an engine of the Pacific type, known as 2-3-1, an engine for heavy trains of high speed..."[/list]

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