Add Press interviewees guidelines

[saivann]

In order to have a clearer path toward interviewees selection, I am suggesting guidelines for inclusion in the README.

These guidelines are aimed to cover all concerns that have been recently expressed and invite current interviewees to adopt a set of professional practices.

[sunnankar]

I think +6 is overly broad and should probably be narrowed to include only acts of violence or gross moral turpitude because there are hundreds of countries each with their own laws and there is significant legal uncertainty around Bitcoin anyway. It would be nice if illegal could be determined based on moral or ethical considerations but that is not how the current legal landscape works in most places. Additionally, peaceful and non-violent civil disobedience is a long-honored practice in human history for enacting political change such as Ghandi, Martin Luther King, etc. and there are several contingents of the Bitcoin community who use it with such intent.

And to go over the top with the absurdity of how overly broad that particular guideline is; For example, under Title 17 Circular 92 Chapter 5 Section 506 of the Copyright Law of the United States it provides " Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed ... (B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies"

There are over 146m results for a simple Google search of "In order to have a" which @saivann knows or should know is copyrighted by someone else yet he still willfully stated such earlier. Consequently, @saivann appears to have engaged in an illegal communication which, under his own readme suggestion, is unbecoming of potential interviewees let alone people in charge of the pull requests.

[saivann]

Indeed, yet here the point is to avoid publicly promoting illegal behavior in the medias, not to have never done anything that could be considered illegal. Perhaps it isn't clear enough? I was under the impression that it was pretty easy for an interviewee to follow rule +6. Otherwise, any suggestion about how this should be re-written? Or then again, perhaps that we can conclude that +7 already covers this enough.

[sunnankar]

For +6 I think this should suffice:
"Interviewees must not publicly encourage violence or acts of moral turpitude."

+7 seems overly broad and begs the question of provocative or subversive to whom. Do we want interviewees to not say anything with regard to Bitcoin that may be considered provocative or subversive to those engaged in acts of violence or moral turpitude against innocent people, perhaps even children, who could use Bitcoin to increase their degree of protection against such predation?

"Interviewees must be able to maintain a diplomatic language and stay away from provocative or subversive language as much as possible."

I think reducing it to just this would probably be sufficient guidance:
"Interviewees role includes objectively educating people and legislators about Bitcoin properties, qualities and innovations."

[saivann]

Mmh, actually that's why I was saying "as much as possible" in "stay away from provocative or subversive language as much as possible." . I think that as a professional practice, it's both worth to mention that not being too emotional or reactive (provocative) is important, especially for live debates. And that since Bitcoin is already enough of a sensitive matter, being diplomatic as much as possible is encouraged.

[saivann]

I tried to improve +7 to address your concern while keeping the relevant parts better worded. However for +6, I think too broad is better than not enough, since these are guidelines and not laws (see +1). I doubt that this could really be a problem. For instance, having an interviewee saying "Go buy drugs online on Silk Road with Bitcoin" on a Bitcoin interviewee is clearly not something that makes sense to keep on bitcoin.org IMO even thought it doesn't fit as being a violence act or moral turpitude. Again, I don't think that this is a restrictive rule, that still doesn't prevent an interviewee to express criticisms against existing laws for instance.

[sunnankar]

Being overly broad is never a good idea and leads to arbitrary, capricious and non-sensical application. Additionally, being overly broad is a sign of laziness and unwillingness to do the hard work of providing clear, concise, accurate and common sense guidelines that can easily be followed and applied.

The problem I see is an issue with conflict of laws.

Using your example of 'Go buy drugs online on Silk Road with Bitcoin' is advocating completely legal behavior in Portugal as they have decriminalized all drugs including the hard ones and would therefore not be in violation of the guidelines. But an interview done in Portugal that finds its way onto Youtube, without the interviewee's knowledge or consent, which could then display the interview in some other jurisdiction where that statement would be advocating something illegal.

Consequently, we should have guidelines which clearly highlight and articulate in a clear, concise and accurate way prohibitions on advocating particular types of behavior which are universally prohibited. For example, 'Use Bitcoins to hire people to perform XXXXXXXXX [violent action].' would be illegal is almost every jurisdiction and easily fall under the example guideline I provided.

[saivann]

I agree that being overly broad doesn't make good laws, but in this case I hardly see cases where this could indeed be used arbitrarily. The example you mentionned wouldn't be a problem because it wouldn't be illegal in the context of the interview. And I doubt that it's really difficult just to not encourage illegal behaviors, isn't it? Oppositely, "violence or acts of moral turpitude" is pretty restricted and would probably never apply in cases where it should to my understanding.

Edit: Moral turpitude, while being a nice term, is also more subject to interpretation than "illegal" as far as I'm concerned. However, I am not against saying "Interviewees must not publicly encourage illegal behaviors according to the jurisdiction where the interview is taking place." or similar.

[sunnankar]

Of course it could be used arbitrarily as a reason to exclude interviewees by people who have either (1) personal vendettas against particular interviewees like we have already seen in the comments to pull requests for adding either Roger Ver or Jon Matonis or (2) as a way to argue for exclusion based on gut feelings or some other non-articulated stance that fails logical scrutiny.

This discussion has arisen out of the need to have clear guidelines to apply to determine who should and should not be listed as potential interviewees. If the attempt is to create guidelines of conduct for potential interviewees to be listed then those guidelines need to be clear, concise and accurate so they are easy to apply and judge whether those included have been acting within the guidelines.

Otherwise why have the guidelines at all? Unless the reason is to have overly broad guidelines that can be arbitrarily and capriciously applied based on gut feelings or personal vendettas to accomplish some personal agenda instead of based on clear rules and sound logical analysis of compliance.

Regarding whether 'it's really difficult just to not encourage illegal behaviors' my argument would be that yes it is difficult to know what is illegal. That is why I think the guidelines should be sufficiently tailored and narrowed to focus on grossly immoral acts which are universally recognized as such. For example, there were 72,000 pages on new laws added to the United States Federal Register in the past year. And that is just one country. Who knows how many other laws were added, amended or gotten rid of in total in all the countries in the world. Consequently, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to be aware of what may or may not be illegal.

On the other hand, it is very easy to assess whether someone has advocated for the use of violence or acts of moral turpitude.

Additionally, this type of guideline would keep interviewees from advocating violence even if that violence is legal in a particular jurisdiction. For example, in a Illinois, a state in the United States, from 1844 to 1976 it was legal to kill people based solely on their particular religion. And there are plenty of other examples where actions have been legal but immoral, ie. Germany, Rwanda and present day actions by several governments. Thus, while the behavior would be legal it would be immoral and against the guidelines.

[mikehearn]

And this is one reason to not have guidelines and just make it up as we go along ..... I think all the above can be boiled down to "use common sense".

[jgarzik]

@mikehearn +1

[saivann]

I agree, it seems that these guidelines, at least for now, are starting to do the opposite of what they are designed to do. So let's not bother more with that for now.