Be careful of what you post

it is not uncommon to come into a station faster than 38 MPH...what a joke of an article

I agree with most of what has been posted here with regard to the consequences of careless postings and that is what I call some of them. I try very hard to be very careful just what I post here and anywhere else for that matter too. THINK BEFORE YOU TYPE.
Thank you for bringing this up.
OH in back in my working days when on the New Haven we were trying to maintain a semblance of a schedule with a single FL-9 and six or seven cars in tow. It was not easy and about the only resource we had was to come in to a station stop as fast as we dared to and still make a platform stop. I can remember hitting the end of the platform westbound at Stamford at 50 to 55 with the brakes set and stopping right where we wanted to and smooth too. Running trains in those days was an art and I enjoyed every bit of it.
Noel Weaver

railroad.net cannot likely be held legally responsible for the posts on this forum (other than their own) thanks for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, because they are considered a provider:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

That said, if a moderator edits a post, they may make themselves legally responsible for the material in that post, depending on what was edited.

railroad.net could be served a subpoena for the information (ip addresses and other information) of the poster, and a given poster could be sued as a "John Doe" defendant until their true identity was found. There is a lot of precedence of that in defamation. Some courts have ruled that "an IP address is not a person" while others disagree, so the outcome would likely depend on the judicial circuit of the person being sued.

In sum, it's unlikely that this forum could be shut down due to someone posting anything, even if it is libelous. The person who posted it might regret it a few years later after a lawsuit works its way through the very slow federal district court, but railroad.net would not likely be in any jeopardy, nor would be the moderators.

siliconwafer wrote:That said, if a moderator edits a post, they may make themselves legally responsible for the material in that post, depending on what was edited.

The whole site could be considered edited. Anything the moderators allow stand could be considered material the site allowed to be published.

If nothing were moderated then the site would be less liable. But as a moderated site it is not a common carrier.

BandA wrote:Call me naive, but aren't reporters required to ask permission before plagiarising someone's writings? And a good reporter is supposed to protect their sources.

This is a public site. In the same way that you can use a few paragraphs of something a reporter has written, they can seek information here and use it. There's nothing unethical about it. Plagiarism is always against journalistic ethics. But I seriously doubt you'd find passages lifted verbatim. More likely, you'd find something like "in railroad.net, some posters have speculated that such-and-such might be the cause of the such-and-such incident." And that wouldn't be unethical at all. It would just be good reporting. It's how reporters sometimes get the truth into a story in which no public official is willing to go on record about things. You should be reassured that reporters look to pools of people who've tried to be informed about the issue in question, in order to see what theories are being considered.

The flipside of that is that most of us here won't have all the facts on virtually any story, and the moderators can't be expected to try to determine whether an individual poster is justified in making allegations. So their conservatism about what should be posted is understandable.

And it's not just people - the recent thread about the Saratoga and North Creek (somewhat erroneously titled "Adirondack Railroad") could well have placed the Adirondack Scenic in the position of defending themselves over something they had nothing even remotely to do with.

Stuff like that can develop a life of its own.

tree68 wrote:Stuff like that can develop a life of its own.

foamers beget additional foaming

mmm foam...

BandA wrote:Call me naive, but aren't reporters required to ask permission before plagiarising someone's writings? And a good reporter is supposed to protect their sources.

Something I've found:

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for 'fair use' for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Not sure how accurate that is. In any case, you'll see when I post news, I always add "brief, fair-use quote". It's our policy to provide a link, attribution, and a relevant portion of the article (not the whole article). So the above, while not necessarily legally accurate (it may or may not be), does embody our policy.

I'll be working on updated policies, terms, conditions, etc.

It's also my belief that we'd not be liable for anything stupid posted on this forum. However, that's not a license for folks to irresponsibly post. Which is why we're moderated. We've received a few threats over the years; some justified, some not. I've got some pending matters I need to take care of.

Ultimately, this forum, with limited resources, has to pick and choose our battles. For me, what it comes down to is, this isn't a place to settle scores, (im)personal or (un)professional .