====================================================================== CFJ 1126 In posting a message to agora-business with the subject "Maximize your website's traffic!", Steve committed the Crime of Misrepresentation by listing "janet998-@yahoo.com" as the "From:" address. ====================================================================== Called by: Chuck Judge: harvel Judgement: FALSE Final Judgement: TRUE Board of Appeals: Crito (J), Blob (S), Morendil (C) Decisions of Justices: Justiciar Crito: OVERTURN/TRUE Speaker Blob: OVERTURN/TRUE CotC Morendil: OVERTURN/TRUE Judgement of Board: Initial Judge selection: Eligible: harvel, David Not eligible: Caller: Chuck Barred: Steve Had their turn: Ørjan, Blob, Murphy, Peekee, Vlad, Kolja A., elJefe, Michael, Morendil, Elysion, Crito Already served: - Defaulted: - By request: - On Hold: - ====================================================================== History: Called by Chuck: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 01:07:45 -0500 Assigned to harvel: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 10:04:20 +0200 Judged FALSE by harvel: Sun, 2 May 1999 11:00:12 -0400 Judgement published: Thu, 6 May 1999 15:24:16 +0200 Appealed by Blob: Fri, 7 May 1999 13:29:54 +1000 Appealed by Michael: Fri, 7 May 1999 09:34:36 +0100 Appealed by Chuck: Fri, 7 May 1999 07:22:57 -0500 Appealed by Crito: Fri, 7 May 1999 09:48:53 -0400 Assigned to Board of Appeals: Fri, 7 May 1999 22:47:55 +0200 Decision O/TRUE from Blob: Fri, 14 May 1999 14:16:17 +1000 Decision O/TRUE from Crito: Fri, 14 May 1999 10:21:41 -0400 Decision O/TRUE from Morendil: Fri, 14 May 1999 11:09:10 +0200 Appelate decision published: as of this message ====================================================================== Justiciar's Decision : As others have pointed out, there is ample evidence that the headers are as much a part of the message, wrt legal significance, as the text of a message. Justice Blob has presented an excellent articulation of the position I hold, which is that the manipulations Steve admitted to making on the spam message constituted the creation of a new message, authored entirely by Steve, which contained a quote of the spam along with additional material. The message which was eventually distributed contained no indication of the actual author, and no disclaimer that any portion of the material was a quote of another message. Therefore, IMO, the message was presented as authored and sent in its entirety by 'janet998-@yahoo.com'. As Steve has admitted, this is incorrect and at the time e submitted the message, Steve knew it to be incorrect. Steve's confession then leaves no reasonable doubt that e committed the Crime of Misrepresentation. I hereby move to overturn the original Judge's findings and return a judgement of TRUE. ====================================================================== Speaker's Decision : We have had much enlightening discussion on this issue, and I am sure that we could continue to do so for a while longer, but our deliberation time is running short, and a decision must be made. So I shall present the argument as I see it, confident that my fellow Justices will ... any extreme positions that I hold. This case has boiled down to a discussion of who sent the message in question. I think all of the Justices are agreed that the reasoning in the original Judge's arguments are well meant but flawed. If Steve did indeed send this message, then the headers are to be considered as part of the "information" contained in that message, and can be taken to assert the sender's identity. If we agree that Steve sent the message, then we can confidently say that in doing so, he asserted that the sender was someone other than himself. In doing so he "present[ed] as correct information which e believe[d] to be incorrect", and so is guilty of the Crime of Misrepresentation, as per Rule 1494. So the argument hinges on the identity of the sender. Steve admits that he had a friend send the original spam message to the lists, but Steve stopped the message from reaching the PF. He also admits to then modifying the contents of the message, and forwarding it on to the list. The question is then, who is the legal sender of the second message? There is a precedent for behvaiour of this kind. In his job as Distributor, Steve has routinely blocked emails sent by Players, when there has been problems with their mailers, or they have sent mail from other accounts. This blocking is, admittedly, done automatically, but it is still done deliberately by Steve. These blocked messages have then on many occasions been forwarded to the list by Steve, with appropriate anotations indicating that they were blocked and forwarded by the distributor. So we have a precedent for the Distributor blocking messages, modifying them, and relaying them to the Public Forum. How do we interpret this precedent, and how does it relate to the case at hand? We have a precedent in the courts that says that a message can be "sent to the Public Forum" even if it is never distributed to the players. And many messages need only be "sent" in this way to have legal effect. So in the case that the Distributor relays the message to the Public Forum, we should not interpret it as sending the message to the PF a second time, but rather that the Distributor is providing evidence that the first message was indeed sent. Game custom supports this conclusion. Messages relayed in this manner and considered to have effect at the time the original message was sent, not at the time the Distributor relayed them. Who, then, is the sender of the second message? It is indisputably the Distributor. Does this conclusion carry over to the message that is the subject of this judgement? I believe it does. The original spam message was sent to the Public forum by a non-Player. Steve blocked this message, modified it, and relayed the new message to the PF. Who is the sender of this new message? The same game custom explained above should prove that it is Steve. The message is indeed _evidence_ of a message sent by a person other than Steve, but is not itself that message. At this point it might be asked, what does the Distributor have to do to a message to affect its authorship in this way? Every message sent to the mailing lists is manipulated by the Distributor in some way, automatically but nevertheless deliberately. For example the Subject header is changed, with the "DIS:", "BUS:" or "OFF:" indicator prepended. Game custom quite sensibly regards this as irrelevant to the authorship of the message. Can we clearly state what kind of changes warrant a change of sender identity? Personally, I doubt that any strict definition will be useful. Rather, we should use common sense to judge individual cases as they arise. In this case, the modified message has a radically different legal effect to the initial message. This is easily enough, in my opinion, to convince us that it is a new message, with a different sender. I do not mean for the converse to be considered necessarily true. A message may still be considered to have a new sender, even if there is no change in legal effect as a result. I leave that issue for another judge to decide. Given that we can reasonably state that the message in question was indeed sent by Steve, we can be confident in asserting that Steve has indeed committed Misrepresentation in the sending it. This message differs from other messages relayed by the Distributor in this way. In this case, Steve made a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that he had modified the message and resent it. In other cases, the message is deliberately annotated to show the change of identity, and so no Misrepresentation occurs. Given this (admittedly lond-winded) argument, I rule to OVERTURN the orignial judgement, and enter a new judgement of TRUE. ====================================================================== CotC's Decision : As I have stated elsewhere, I feel that there are merits to both sides of the debate regarding the matter of whether Steve's unconventional manipulations of some text initially conveyed to the Public Forum by the agency of a third person are of such a nature or extent that we should deem Steve emself, instead of or in addition to, the original poster, to have been the author or sender of the message in its final form. However, I prefer to side with my fellow Justices, if only to stress that (in my opinion at least) we are electing not to let the part of the Judgement in 1125 that was concerned with identity - and quoted in harvel's initial Judgement of this CFJ - stand as precedent, insofar as this Appellate Judgement directly contradicts that portion of the Judgement in 1125. (It is thus my opinion that the precedent established by 1125 thus rests only on the 'clear indication' issue.) I hereby enter a decision of OVERTURN/TRUE. ====================================================================== Judge's Arguments: R1497 defines the Crime of Misrepresentation as a Player's presenting as correct information which e believes to be correct as part of any message sent to the Public Forum. Further, from CFJ 827, if it is not clear that information is *not* presented as correct, then it should be considered to *be* so. Thus, if the email address "janet998-@yahoo.com" in the From: header is considered information as part of a message presented as correct, then Steve did commit the Crime of Misrepresentation. However, as R1575 says, "A CFJ alleging that a Player has...committed a Crime shall not be judged TRUE unless the evidence is sufficient to be certain of that Judgement beyond reasonable doubt." If there were no further evidence, this Court would be forced to return a Judgement of FALSE, since there is a reasonable doubt that the From: header should be considered part of the message with regard to R1497. The body of an email message is the only part which has legal standing-- one cannot make a Proposal in the Subject: header, nor can one inform the Registrar of eir new email address simply by changing the From: header in one's outgoing mail. The OFF:, BUS:, and DIS: elements of the Subject: header, while useful for mailing list participants, have no standing in the Rules. Let us also consider the recent Judgement of CFJ 1125. Crito says, in part: A message can be considered to have been sent by a given Player if and only if the message clearly identifies that Player as the author.... The "spam" post fails this test and, in the opinion of this court, should be deemed not to have been sent by any Player. Again, if we do not consider this, then a Judgement of FALSE must be returned, because of reasonable doubt. If the Judgement of CFJ 1125 stands, however, a Judgement of FALSE must still be returned. If Steve is deemed not to have sent the message, then e cannot possibly be guilty of Misrepresentation. Therefore, this Court returns a Judgement of FALSE. ===================================================================== Caller's Arguments: Steve is not janet998-@yahoo.com, nor did he believe himself to be at that address at the time the message was posted. While a mailing list's moderator might be justified in posting a message which had been rejected from a list to that list, this is not the case here, as 1) by Steve's own admission, the spam which makes up most of this message was sent to Geoff Wong, and not to a-b, and 2) the message was altered by Steve by the inclusion of additional text. Thus, the message can only be construed as being from Steve, and by listing an address which was not Steve's in the "From:" line, he committed the Crime of Misrepresentation. ====================================================================== Evidence attached by the Caller: "Evidence available upon request." ======================================================================