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quote:

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the kind of people who refuse to register and participate would be too frightened to use their real names anyway

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Exactly Man says: Exactly.

There are probably several times as many silent lurkers as active participants. Among the lurkers are equipment manufacturers, cinema circuit execs, theater managers, etc. Oh yeah, they are here, probably in droves. Some of them despise film-tech because sometimes unkind things are said about them and they find such comments threatening. In their circle of associates, they defend themselves and deflect critical comments by painting film-techers as whiners, uninformed, grudge-carrying ax-grinders not interested in facts or the "real world", etc. They can't acknowledge that film-tech is about raising the bar of presentation quality, because to do so means openly discussing the problems of their industry. Wouldn't want to do that.

Of course the reason I can say this is I'm not in the industry so I can't get fired.

If you're working because you have to (which is almost everyone), you may think twice before painting yourself into the "Look at me, I'm a troublemaker!" corner with your employer. I can say in all honesty if I were working for, say, Regal or Cinemark, whose presentation I often criticize (and occasionally praise) here, I would probably temper my comments or not talk about presentation at all, for fear of drawing negative attention. Yes, ideally they should welcome constructive criticism because it can help them improve their product. But that's in Perfect World.

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Sorry if that sounds a bit vague - here's a 'for example'. Let's say that I wrote a highly critical post about an product manufactured and sold in the UK which Brad allowed to appear on this site. The manufacturer reads the post and believes my criticisms to be unjustified because they are based on false information, a misunderstanding of what that product is supposed to do or another serious material difference. (S)he then has a number of options. 1 - ask Brad to remove the post. It's his site, running on his equipment and therefore his decision. What if he says no? I guess that option 2 would be for that hypothetical UK company to go all the way to Texas, hire a US lawyer and try to get a court order for the post to be removed. That would be far too expensive for many small companies. Option 2 - go to all the ISPs operating in the UK and ask them to block Film Tech. That would mean contacting hundreds of organisations and would to all intents and purposes be impossible.

Finally, they could just sue me, which I'm pretty sure is what they'd do. This is exactly what happened recently with www.friendsreunited.co.uk - a site which enables you to make contact with people you were at school with and have lost contact. Someone wrote a post alleging that one of their former teachers was a paedophile - that teacher found out about it, sued the individual and won substantial damages. He didn't even bother with the website owners.

So in this country at least, a precedent seems to have been established whereby an individual is responsible for what he or she publishes on the Internet, not the site operator or ISP. Incidentally, this is different from other media: for example, the case under the Obscene Publications Act when Lady Chatterley's Lover was published was directed against the publisher, not the author.

But there's another aspect to this as well. I sometimes read Film Tech from home in the evenings, but mostly read it at work during coffee breaks and stuff. Were I to post something which could incur civil or criminal liability, my employer would have a pretty good case for alleging that I'd bought it into disrepute. After all, click on the 'who' button above this post and you'll get my work details. I suppose I could try and avoid this possibility by describing myself as a private individual and never mentioning my professional life on this site, but as the whole point of this site is mainly to discuss work practices, this would kind of defeat the object of the exercise.

But if I was to sue you for slandering my beloved Vic 10, New Zealand does not have the First.