From: krs@uts.amdahl.com (Kris Stephens [Hail Eris!])
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Automatic disclaimers on outbound postings from a corporation
Date: 16 Apr 92 19:05:57 GMT
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA

In article <1992Apr16.115048.24215@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In article <1992Apr16.032526.17951@rootgroup.com> davehieb@magi.rootgroup.com (David Hieb) writes:
>>
>>i'm looking for the best way to automatically incorporate a corporate
>>disclaimer into all news articles that are posted from within an
>>organization.
>>...
>>can anyone recommend a good procedure?
>
>  Yes.  I recommend you forget the whole idea.
>
>  Anybody reading usenet should already be assuming that postings are the
>individual poster's rantings and ravings.  Do you have to rub it in?

For those of you in the Education realm, it's less of an issue than for
those of us in the commercial world.  Here in the US, at least, we have
some specific exposures in The Law making the Corporation responsible
for various types of individual infractions by employees while at work.
This is exacerbated by State and Local Law that can't *cancel* Federal
Law, but can certainly increase the liabilities and add to what's illegal.

Behavioral examples include, notably, racial, sexual, .*al harassment
that leads to the corporate liability of "Creating a hostile work
environment".  Contractual liabilities with netnews postings include
having a customer hold the corporation to the letter of an article
describing product/service functionality, undisclaimed, by some yahoo
who isn't privy to what the corporation is *really* willing and able
to commit to.  I don't know what liability exists if an employee posts
an article that breaks copyright law from a work system; a disclaimer
might not even apply, or it might, if worded correctly.

Dave's request is a valid one, even if not for your particular environment.
Corporate Policy on "Appropriate Use", while different than US or any
other Government Policy on the subject, may require employees to disclaim
articles in a specific fashion, and teaching the software to do it
automatically for the user simply makes it easier for the employee to
fulfill his/her obligation.  With input from Admins et al, it ultimately
is a decision for Upper Management to make on recommendations by the
legal beagles;  part of *my* input must include describing for them what's
feasible in the hardware and software.

For reference, at least, I'd like to know what the solutions might be in
an environment with the multiple subdomains of systems within my corporation,
multiple news-spooling systems, tons of news-readers (rn, nn, vn, readnews,
gnus, rrn, Xrn, ...), and so on and on.  We've also got a mix of bnews- and
cnews-managed spools.  So far, Amdahl Corporate Policy doesn't require
disclaimers explicitly, but it wouldn't surprise me to find at some point
that the policy *should* be written that way, and an implementation in the
netnews software would be extremely useful.

...Kris
-- 
Kristopher Stephens, | (408-746-6047) | krs@uts.amdahl.com | KC6DFS
Amdahl Corporation   |                |                    |
     [The opinions expressed above are mine, solely, and do not    ]
     [necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Amdahl Corp. ]
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b