[Commons-Law] The 498A Debate and Commons Law

[Lawrence Liang]

Dear All

The  debate on 498A has been going on for a while on commons law, and while
it is an important one, I would also like to take this opportunity as one of
the list moderators to point out a few things.

This is also pertinent to questions of Area specific lists v. general lists.
The Commons-Law list is primarily a list meant for discussion on questions
of Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/culture commons. It has a wide
range of reader-participants, both from a legal background as well as many
more from a non legal background.

>From time to time we have of course discussed a range of issues beyond IP,
and rightfully so. But I also believe that there is a danger in the list
becoming a general legal list, primarily because there are many other lists
that are   created specifically  for that purpose.

A general legal discussion, especially when it gets into legal nitty
gritties can end up alienating people from a  non legal background, as well
as cluttering mail boxes of people who may have joined the list because of a
specific interest.

I would therefore request people who have an interest in pursuing the 498A
discussion to continue some of the conversation offline or if there are
enough people interested, perhaps to start a specific list for the topic.
That will assist both in terms of creating a community around the issue, as
well as in future archival purposes.

I would like to reiterate that this is not to deter form the importance or
quality of the discussion, but if lists are to survive and thrive, it does
not help if we all post either the same mails to multiple lists or to
convert all lists into general discussion boards.

Thanks


For Commons Law Admin
Lawrence


PS:

Commons-law is a subcriber based non  moderated list`. This means that no
posts by a moderator is moderated, except when it exceeds size or is caught
by the spam filter for whatever reason. Posts by  any non-subcriber  is
automatically blocked and needs special administrative clearance. Also, we
get `non-subscriber` spam of about 150 a day and so there is a lot of
backroom cleaning that happens.

Also, the list recognises `emails` addresses as subscribers not names of
people. So in case you post from your non-subscribed email, the  posting
gets blocked.