[Patents] provoking censorship

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> Shouldn=B4t these debates be moderated by an administrator in order to
> keep the standard of the newsgroup? I=B4ve seen that done before and it
> makes the Internet a better place. A bit like police on the streets.

I have also gone through this in at least one mailing list.
The patter is as follows:

There is a dangerous dissident opinion that part of the readers need to
exclude from the forum.
An agent provocateur turns up, responding to this need.
The provocation escalates to libel or similar
(e.g. "anarchists threatening the physical safety of PA
Smith, who had to remove his website from the net").
This again leades to endless meta-debates which are tiresome to the
normal readers.
The partisans of the agent provocateur intensify the flamewar.
A majority of unattentive readers tends to blame those with the dissident
opinion, whom they found disturbing in the first place.
=3D=3D> A new regime of mailing list censorship is established.

Actually this is a common mechanism for derailing democracy, not only on
the Net.  Think of the Reichstag fire.  We just received a letter
instigating us to physically harm "Mr. Smith".  Maybe "Mr. Smith" is only
a fiction, and the known article writer is just as much a victim of
cowardly libel as the Eurolinux group is.

When advance and the socially responsible people prefer to keep their
mouth shut, finally an authoritarian regime may even become an objective
necessity.  But we are very far away from there, and I am grateful to see
that at least the moderator seems to have his eyes open and to be
committed to a free and productive discussion.

-phm