The policy conference was set up to talk about The WELL policy... the banners
of the conference tell the tale. If you enter in the older, text-based
PicoSpan interface rather than with your web browser, you will see:
Welcome to The WELL Policy Conference.
Ideas and discussion relating to the handling of human issues
both on The WELL and outside of The WELL.
One of the signatures of The WELL is YOYOW.
YOYOW is the nickname for the following bit of essential prose, coined
by Stewart Brand, and now the cornerstone of our local culture:
You Own Your Own Words.
"This means that you are responsible for the words
that you post on The WELL and that reproduction
of those words without your permission in any medium outside
of The WELL conferencing system may be challenged
by you, the author."
We talk YOYOW all the time,
when we aren't preoccupied with yo! or YOW!
So, you've got your intellectual property, your taking responsibility for your
(verbal) actions, your assumption of liability, your establishment that
there may be repercussions to use of language! All that juicy territory...
in that simple YOYOW phrase. This has made the policy conference a place to
be!
The YOYOW mantra has been expanded into an agreement with more details.
