On 8 Dec 2004, at 8:53 am, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
The discussion about common carriers is all very interesting, but irrelevant. There are many protections in American law, and common carrier status is only one. We are certainly not responsible for things which are not obscene, and the package in question is not obscene (b/c under US law a cartoon such as that cannot be legally obscene).
I could be wrong, but Debian is occasionally used and distributed by people outside the USA. Making any argument in this thread with reference solely to US law is irrelevant to the problems at hand.
To be honest I really don't see what the problem is here. Content which is illegal to distribute in pretty much any significant market should be kept off the first CD, and probably shouldn't be in main. That way, users and distributors in any country can distribute and/or use the basic Debian distribution without any worries. They can distribute or use other parts of the archive, including packages such as the Bible or Hot-babe, at their own discretion. I have no problems with people packaging these things, they just shouldn't be part of the base install, or present on the media required to perform a base install.
Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts GPG: 1024/D FC81E159 5BA6 8CD4 2C57 9824 6638 C066 16E2 F4F5 FC81 E159
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