The friend here makes a true, but misleading statement.

Anyone should be able to defend his/her position, whether on a personal or non personal matter. But just because one dislikes what is said, and one has a right to refute what was said, a person’s (or the person’s children) life or business should not be disrupted and destroyed because of what was said.

Freedom of speech is, after all, the right to say what others find don’t like or find objectionable, without one’s life, family and business being disrupted or destroyed.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

Freedom of speech cuts both ways, if people have the right to say what they want, then their victims have an equal right to defend themselves. And amongst the many friends that Jon undoubtedly has, he has also made more than his fair share of enemies.

Nothing personal. Time to move on, good call Jon, and good luck

Cheers@

I certainly understand first-hand your hassles with spam. We have been dealing with the same sort of thing over at Boycott Riaa ( http://www.boycottriaa.com ) and currently, our “comments” are down due to the spam activities (although we are using DMusic forums as a backup) …but we will soon be implementing a system that uses “captcha” like you do to help thwart the automated spam-bots.

Best wishes!

Shmoo, aka “independentmusician”
Admin/Mod of Boycott Riaa
Support Local and Independent Music!

Jon, even if wanted to accept responsibility you could not. Here is why:

a. For defamation to exist a statement must be untruth.
b. To determine a truth requires research and evidence. Postings from people all over the world may have a “facts” things that are not true but are impossible to research due to limited time, resources and access to the real facts.

Additionally, if you allow only postings that off hand, without research or evidence offend no one and be critical (meaning no one is criticized) of no one, then the postings will neve be controversial. The published posts would all be lame “mutual admiration society” type that would be useless and boring.

A web news site, like a newspaper, a magazine and radio station without controversies, information that may be or may not be true or critial will soon disappear. That is not what the peopple want from news sources.

And each time you filtered a posting there will be a reader who will scream that the free speech rights were violated. Rightfully so.

Hey, may here is a good argument in your lawsuit: It is simply not possible to filter out free speech, what people say.

Jon, I know I haven’t said anything you did not know. It’s that others should know it too.

Good luck for you, p2pnet and p2pnet.ca.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com