The Escapist Staff said:
040: PAX & Star Wars Kinnect
This week, we recap our experience at PAX. We also discuss the Star Wars Kinnect game, whether you should care about the creator or only the creation and the liability of behavior in an online space.
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Favorite moment: Susan saying (about a hypothetical user threatening to kill themselves), "Good. Film it." Just the way she said it, I swear a cold breeze blew through my apartment.
About that whole thing, though, the line is even harder to draw when you consider that the same action can have different consequences depending on the victim. One person, you say, "Go die in a fire," and he shrugs it off... the next guy, you say, "Hey, if the chance comes up for you to die in a fire, at least consider it for me, okay?" and he's found burned to death the next day.
It's a lot like murder versus attempted murder -- should the Attempted Murder Guy get a lesser sentence just because he got lucky (or screwed up)? How many people drive home drunk and
don't hit anyone or anything on the way? So do we punish the
action or punish the
consequence? And, as you all mentioned, do you also punish the
instigator?
This is the reason I think civil court doesn't require the cut-and-dry circumstances of criminal court. If you do something stupid, and it's not necessarily
criminally stupid, but it does lead to horrible unintended consequences, civil court exists so that the victim has a form of redress without the rigor required by criminal court.
I say let people sue for it. The internet has become so much a part of actual life that it's high time we considered it a bit more like actual life. Sometimes you do something stupid and get away unscathed, and sometimes you kick off the Apocalypse. Either way, the consequences should find you.
Privacy is cool. It's anonymity that can so often be dangerous. The internet is like a new country, and we're all trying to establish who has jurisdiction there. The first thing we need to deal with is the complete facelessness of the internet. In the real world, we can all have a certain expectation of privacy, but there are also mechanisms in place that ensure we're accountable for things we'd rather not be...
The internet needs a bit of that, and a bit less of the Old West.