I'm going to ignore much of this because it is none of my business.

What I want to comment on, based on being an originator of original content and as a one time part owner of a small on-line publishing company and having to defend my clients works, is the legality of publishing an e-mail.

Not only is the publishing of an e-mail sent to you a breach of the implied confidentiality and privacy of the communication, it is also a breach of actual law in most countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention (often referred to as the copyright treaty).

Publishing a private e-mail (which even though you are the recipient, you do not have the legal right to publish in most instances) also breaks a bond of trust between the two parties

In this instance a private e-mail was made public as an actual word for word quote. This is not legal in most of the civilized world. Paraphrasing it might be OK, quoting very short chunks of it might be OK, quoting the whole thing is not.

I would expect and hope that an "author" would have enough understanding of the law that protects them (and others) to know that.

When a client would come to me for assistance in publishing something on-line I would first make damned sure they understood what was necessary to understand about international copyright law. Once I was assured they understood how it worked for themselves and others, I would publish and fight for their rights (yes, I've killed other websites that played fast and loose with copyrights held by myself or clients).

To make it brief (I know, I know, it's too late for that): If you didn't write it or draw it or photograph it, don't publish it unless you have specific permission from the owner of the copyright. For e-mail, that's the originator.

As a last note, "freedom of expression" is only in reference to the government not censoring most utterances, and does not apply at all to decisions by private individuals to permit or not permit others to use their property (web site in this instance) to publish anything. Period.

I'll shut up now and crawl back into my cave, but I will leave you with something to look at and bookmark: 10 Myths of Copyright (http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html)

http://home.earthlink.net/~zip98498/tomsig01.gif

P.S. Yes, I am known as an anal-retentive pain-in-the-ass. Why do you ask? :p

T

One thing that I've always wanted is for stories to be flagged "consensual" or "non-consensual". There's a lot of scary non-consensual stories here; I read them just to see the castration scenes, but would have preferred if they were consensual. For example, today I saw a story where a German fighter pilot ejected over a British farm, and the farm girls captured him, emasculated him, and strangled him to death.

At one of the posters to this thread request I've read it and my first comment is please calm down and take a breath.

As one who specializes in adult/youth themes and whose stories are posted at various sites over the last several years I've learned several things.

One it is the site owners perogative as to what gets posted. And I've gotten rejected several times, and lived with it. And usually found someplace else to post. :p

Second is if the editor/moderator doesn't like something enough to kill the story see if you can work around it without wrecking the story from your perspective.

Third, the better your work and the more you submit to a site the more you can get away with.

And finally, the owner is always right. Why? Because he's the owner.

MC Fogel

Would anyone believe me if I said that my evil twin started this thread? No...I suppose not, so I’ll have to take responsibility for it. I have already apologized to Paolo privately by email. Now, I wish to make that apology public. This was never about Freedom of Expression. It was about my being in a snit because I thought that Paolo wasn’t going to publish one of MY stories. It’s not as if this archive, or the world, were going to suffer if it didn’t get published. It isn’t, by any means, a work of literary excellence. My action was egotistical and childish. His publishing the story, even though it disgusted him, makes my starting this thread even more foolish.

I wish to also apologize to the readers of this board. Everyone who criticized my behavior was justified in doing so. I’m sorry.

I will continue to submit stories, however, because I’m committed to improving my writing skills, it won’t be so often. I have much work-studying-to do.

Look guys,

When *I* was in charge of the incoming story tank I basically tried to clean up formatting on a few stories and tried to make sure there was a castration in them somewhere but ultimately *virtually* everything went out.

Please affirm my faith in all of you and post here on this thread that you recogniza the great benefit that the Archive has of Paolo's talents reading the stories and working with the authors when needed?

I see everything that comes in, regardless of whether Paolo decides to post it or not. What I am talking about is NOT censorship.

Paolo actually reads each and every story. Not like me when I skimmed them.

He does an excellent job not imposing his standards of what he likes and dislikes, but he does impose a certain standard of story quality for lack of a better term and consistancy in labeling and catagorizing story tags.

This takes a lot of time and effort and even though I personally appreciate the work and effor of every author that submits something to the Archive, take a look back at some of the stuff that got posted on my watch and you will realize the awesome resource we have in Paolo.

And he's not just Mr. Delete either. He will work with any author if there is a problem or an issue with a story.