Effi Fush, an Israeli law student and blogger, promised in early April to publish a first version of an ethical code for Hebrew bloggers. On early June, instead of a paper he launched a personalized ethical code generator, an online application designed to generate a personalized ethical code for individual bloggers.
"After I failed to jumpstart a public debate in order to draft a unified code for all the bloggers in Israel, I realized that we would never reach a version that would be adopted by all", he said. "The reason being very simple - it's against the bloggers' nature to limit themselves by rigid rules". Fush said that previous attempts to launch a code in Israel failed exactly because of such reasons. He estimates that American code initiative, lead by Tim O'Reilly, will fail also fail because of that.
The ethical code generator is an attempt to do away with the existing concept of "Read and Accept" (a ready made code that the user can only accept or deny). It rather aims to provide a user-friendly tool that will produce a document based on the blogger's preferences. The blogger will be presented with a series of questions pertaining to her preferences (such as under which license would it be allowed to use the blog content? What is the blog's user anonymity policy? and so on).
The token version 1.0 was written by Arik Freimovich and was released for comments. However, being a first version it does not address all the issues Fush hopes to solve.
New Ethical Code Generator for Hebrew Blogs
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