Exclusion from the Gallery Rating System

leanne_newton · June 30, 2003

Was that cream tart aimed at me, Robert ?

mottershead · June 30, 2003

We have received an email from Anna which purports to be a copy of a letter that is now in the mail from her lawyers. This letter, which is from a person who presents herself as an Italian lawyer, asserts claims of discrimination, defammation, and non-performance of contract. I will post my response to this letter, for your information, in this thread a bit later today. Without permission, I think it best not to post the letter itself.

I would greatly appreciate it if people would be very circumspect in what they say concerning Anna from now on, and if anybody recalls a statement that seems defammatory here in this thread, or elsewhere on the site, I would appreciate an email on that subject, so that I can remove it. I remind everybody that defammatory statements are against the site policy, and it is the site's policy and duty to delete them when we learn of them.

I have not read every post in this thread (believe it or not), although I have read a lot of it. I don't recall any statements that I would consider to be defammatory. But I am now going to reread all of this thread, and I might delete some of the posts, even a few that might not be defammatory in a strict legal sense. I regret the need for this. If any of our friends are lawyers with some knowledge in this area, and would care to help us out, perhaps you could review this and any other threads that you recall and let us know if you see any problems.

As for Anna, as far as I am concerned her presence on this site now has a fixed end date, which is in six weeks time when the "extra photo quota" for which she paid expires. As I said above, her subscription has already expired, despite the fact that we have not yet removed her icon. Until then I believe the site's interests are best served by permitting her to continue to access the site. After that, her license to use this site will be revoked along with all her photos.

jorge_gasteazoro4 · June 30, 2003

What really is dumb and outrageous are the Jorge-type of words. She (disparaging: "Ms P") mostly shoots flowers (like me), what can be 7/7 about shooting flowers, why don't she go anywhere else, there are lots of places?

One of the first posts in the thread (meanwhile deleted) stated to another poster: your pictures are (analogueos) trash, not worth to be shown, better delete them all. Gee, these are the people who should be banned who insult other posters with good will.

Ah Peter...you are way off base here. I use the "Ms. P" because I dont know how to spell her last name, nor do I know if the lady is married, single, divorced etc. It is not ment to be disparaging, it is only an identifier.

As to the rest of your post, that is you putting words on my mouth. I never said nor implied for people to go somewhere else, or that there is no place for this kind of photography on PN. I merely said that IMO her photographs were not deserving of the 6 and 7`s given to them. As the pictures showed a clear lack of originality. This is exactly the problem.

For one I am nobody to decide what kind of photography should be on PN, or who should be here or not, that is Brian and the other PN staff turf, second since I dont post, review or rate photos I could not care less what is posted here. What I do care about is the continued smooth running of PN simply because the forums are contained in this site and I enjoy them a lot. It saddens me to see that now we are going the lawyer route for something so silly as this. I see Ms. P chose not to rise to the challange of having her work published or sold through galleries but rather decided to use lawyers and the threat of lawsuits to get her way. I have no idea why is it so important to have ratings of 7/7.

This is a clear case of abuse of litigation, where the person complaining is essentiatilly saying "if you dont do as I want I will sue you!". I am not a lawyer but if I was I would certainly help PN and I do hope there is one among the memebership that will be willing to donate some of his time to resolve this.

Brian, now you know why they say "No good deed goes unpunished."

mottershead · June 30, 2003

This is my response to Anna regarding the letter she forwarded to me. To be honest, at this point, I am not sure that it really was from a lawyer, and the person didn't actually say that she was a lawyer. In at least one place in the letter, Anna is referred to as "me", suggesting that Anna had a hand in writing at least part of it herself, and the other person's editing/translation didn't blend Anna's text in very well. Certainly, the letter was not from a person who is very fluent in written English, and even making allowance for that, the language seemed quite disconnected and not very lawyer-like. But perhaps I am underestimating the language problem. If it was indeed from a lawyer, which seems at least possible, I do appreciate the effort taken to send me a letter in English.

Here is the text of my response:

Anna,

When we receive your lawyer's letter in the post, we shall consider it.

However, I point out that your 1 year $25 subscription already expired on May 20, 2002, and we do not intend to renew it. Any claims made on the basis of a contractual relationship between you and photo.net arising from your expired subscription are therefore without merit. You also have purchased, for $100, "extra photo quota"; but this gives you only the right to extra photo space. Incidentally, we also do not intend to renew that quota, which expires in about 6 weeks.

Even if your subscription were still in effect, there is nothing in the subscription terms or "extra photo quota" terms that commits the site to maintain the rating system as it was when you subscribed or enrolled for "extra photo quota" or which limits the site's curatorial rights with respect to your photos.

When you subscribe to a print magazine, you don't have a cause for legal complaint if a feature that you like is changed or removed by editorial decision. If you become a paid member of a museum that is exhibiting your work, you don't have a cause for legal complaint when the museum moves the work to a different room that you don't like, or even takes down the exhibition entirely, unless it was specified and agreed as a condition of your membership that it would not be moved or removed.

The ratings are the site's curatorial system for determining which photos will be given the most prominence in the Gallery. We consider ourselves free to arrange the rating system to suit our own purposes, as we see fit, to eliminate it, or to decide the conditions under which photos will be eligible for inclusion in the rating system and in the site features which are based on the rating system. We have made many changes to the rating system and the features that exploit the ratings, including major changes, since your membership started. For example, "Top Photos" did not even exist on the site when your now-expired subsription started.,

We will continue to make changes to the rating system in order to achieve photo.net's goal of presenting a diverse, instructive, and high-quality sample of the photographs that are submitted by members of the site. The latest change is that we have altered the rating system so that portfolios that exceed a threshold number of ratings (currently 10,000), and/or which receive an excessive number of ratings that in our opinion are not valid or well-considered will be removed from the rating system. Your portfolio objectively meets the first of these criteria, and in our opinion (which is definitive) also meets the second criterion. Indeed, over the past year, we have repeatedly deleted ratings on your photos because they came from accounts which had clearly been created solely for the purpose of inflating the ratings on your photos. We did not hold you responsible for these accounts, or rebuke you; nor did you protest when we deleted these ratings.

Your portfolio has therefore been placed /hors competition./ As a result of your involvement of lawyers in this dispute, our intention is to remove your account and photos, and withdraw your license to access the site, when your "extra photo quota" expires in six weeks. Meanwhile, there is a link to your entire portfolio on the Gallery Main page, a prominence which until now was enjoyed only by the site's founder, Philip Greenspun. Visitors may view the photos and submit comments. Your photographs that have previously been rated are still visible in the "Top Photos" for the relevant periods and ranking criteria. If you choose to submit any new photos during the six weeks, they will be eligible to be in the "Top Photos" under the "Number of Views", "Number of Folder Views", and "Number of Comments" criteria.

Your threat of legal action concerning our decision is futile and bizarre, and an American court will doubtless dismiss any lawsuit that you may pursue as frivolous. Even supposing that you do have a contractual right to receive ratings on your photos until your "extra photo quota" expires, we are not under any legal obligation to maintain the current computation of "Top Photos" and other features that use those ratings, as they currently exist. Were you to prevail in legally compelling us to allow the rating of your photos to continue (which is highly improbable), there would be nothing compelling us to maintain the "Top Photos" feature to your liking. For example, it would be quite reasonable to alter the Top Photo algorithms to disregard ratings made in excess of a certain number on one person's portfolio, which would have the same effect as placing your portfolios /hors competition. /Indeed this is a change that we have seriously considered making independent of this case.

Even if you were to prevail in all your strange claims about the current relationship between photo.net and you, and a court enjoined us to delay our actions with respect to your portfolio, no American court would find that your $125 payments to us a year ago gives you the perpetual right to a prominent presence for your photos on our web site and a permanent veto over any editorial or curatorial decisions that we might make regarding the site. The most you can possibly hope for is that your remaining six weeks of "photo quota" can be turned into a six week delay of our decision to remove you from the rating system. When you already have 300 photos on the site and 10,000 ratings on your photos, is the remote possibity of a few extra weeks of ratings on your photos worth the expense and trouble of legal action?

As for the claims of discrimination, in many situations American law prohibits, as illegal discrimination, the making of adverse decisions against a person on the basis of his race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, or religion. It is true that our new curatorial policy in the Gallery singles you out, in that you are the only person so far who has 10,000 ratings on his or her portfolio, and you are the only person who we have so far determined to have received an excessive number of ratings that are invalid in the opinion of the moderators. It probably will not come as any consolation to you to learn that at least on the second point, you may not be the singular case for very long. Discrimination is not mere singling out of a person. Nor is this one of the situations in which discrimination by a private person is illegal (such as a housing, medical care, or employment decision), nor is it one of the prohibited forms of discrimination. We don't even know what race or ethnicity you are, how old you are, or what your religion is. We presume you are an Italian woman from your name, your address and your portrait, and we can speculate about the other attributes, but none of these played any part in our decisions with respect to you. I would be amazed if you could find even the appearance that these factors ever play a part in our decisions on the site. I completely reject your discrimination argument.

As for the claims of defamation, I am not aware of defamatory statements made concerning you by representatives of the site. The statement that I made in the referenced forum thread was, in essence, that in my opinion the ratings on your photos have ceased to be valid because of excessive enthusiasm and automatic high ratings on the part of your admirers and excessive antipathy on the part of your critics (whom I referred to as the "balance brigade"). This is not a defamatory statement. It is a statement of my opinion about the validity of the ratings on your photos. You may feel that this implies a criticism of your photos, which may well be true. Criticism of your photos is not criticism of you, and even if it is not all criticism of a person is defammatroy. In particular, I would be amazed if the critique of an artist's work is defammatory, especially in a venue where you have voluntarily posted your work for critique. No statement has been made by officials of the site concerning your character, honesty, morals, or any other attribute of yours which might give rise to a defamation claim. While I alluded to instances in which we have removed accounts and ratings that were clearly fraudulent and apparently created solely for the purpose of inflating the ratings on your photographs, I took care to state that we did not hold you responsible for these accounts, presenting them only as an extreme case of the "excessive enthusiasm" of your fans. Indeed, I stated that our actions relative to your portfolio did not have anything to do with "abuse". [i should have added on this point, that no statements were made about Anna at all in this thread, until she came in and announced that the policy had been applied to her and threatened legal action. ]

Sincerely,

Brian Mottershead

mottershead · June 30, 2003