JonathanCarter: In my opinion, the host of the aggregator service should have the right to remove posts that are inappropriate, or that may cause some kind of damage. Since Canonical 'hosts' Planet Ubuntu, will they be held responsible if a partner's product information gets leaked? I think it would be great to get some legal input here (Matthew, perhaps you can help?). I also don't think it's appropriate if people use a planet strictly for their own agendas. Their blogs should be just that, blogs, not a tool simply to push their agenda on Planet Ubuntu (not that we've really had much of a problem so far).
MatthewEast: The usual (slightly unsatisfactory answer) is that it will depend on the terms of the contract that Canonical has with a business partner. Generally, if there is a confidentiality provision and a leak occurs as a result of a Canonical employee, Canonical might be held liable (although the liability might not be particularly severe - it seems to me that generally no significant loss will be suffered by a leak occuring a day before a planned press release). In the event that news gets around purely as a result of community speculation, even if the speculation is hosted on an aggregator provided by Canonical, I don't see that Canonical would be liable for that as a matter of contract. Obviously illegal material creates different issues (such as those currently being addressed by Digg). I think the main focus of this spec should be on prevention - ensuring better internal communication within Canonical and better policies for Canonical's interaction with the community in general - some parts of Canonical have no relationship with the community at all and vice versa. Improving this will go a long way to solving the problem at source. In the case of the Dell news, someone taking the time to email the persons whose blogs had been removed from Planet with a sincere explanation was all that it would have taken to diffuse the situation. I'm disappointed and surprised that this wasn't done. I also agree with AndrewZajac that the issue touches all aspects of the community rather than just Planet Ubuntu.
MartinAlbisetti: Maybe there could be a "planet.canonical.com" to make it clearer what is official from Canonical and what is from Ubuntu?
ScottJamesRemnant: business partners of Canonical won't see the artificial distinction between the URLs.
AndrewZajac: Should this spec cover other areas such as forums, fridge, mailing lists? Would Canonical have asked the forums to delete/jail posts if the news was leaked there instead of on the planet? If it happened on the mailing list, would that person be sactioned or prevented from further posting to the list, for example? Should there be a blanket editorial policy that applies to all aspects of the community?
MaryGardiner: This might be impossible considering that Canonical is Ubuntu's major sponsor and does bizdev for Ubuntu, but perhaps the planet could be hosted elsewhere, like the forums? planetubuntucommunity.org or something. This is probably not the right fix (since news could also be leaked on the wiki or mailing lists or...), but perhaps it is one that should be discussed: act to decisively break any responsibility Canonical could be seen as having for the actions of non-employees on community forums. (cf AndrewZajac's comment also).