Slashdot Mirror
UK's Demon Settles Usenet Libel Case
Uri writes "A BBC article has just reported that Laurence Godfrey, a physicist, has won around $400,000 from Demon Internet, a leading UK ISP, over defamatory posting about him which appeared on usenet. Note that under English Law, ISPs are held responsible for defamatory material if they do not take reasonable care to ensure such material is not published, and if they do not remove such material when alerted to it. It was the latter that Demon refused to do, and which prompted the legal action. The case now threatens to put an huge strain on all English ISPs as they could be forced to monitor all material trafficking through their systems. Go England! "
An interesting snippet from the article: "Although such discussion forums are often full of robust, forthright and even offensive opinions posted by individuals, the case hinged on whether Demon could be treated as publisher of the material." I wonder how well British universities would like to be treated as publishers, and therefore Net-content nannies ...
Note that under English Law, ISPs are held responsible
for defamatory material if they do not take reasonable care to
ensure such material is not published, and if they do not remove
such material when alerted to it. It was the latter that Demon
refused to do, and which prompted the legal action. The case now
threatens to put an huge strain on all English ISPs as they could
be forced to monitor all material traficking through their systems.
It's much more likely that ISPs could be forced to examine material that is claimed to be defamatory and remove it if they judge it to be defamatory. That's a looooooooooong way from actively patrolling their customer's websites searching for defamatory material.
Slashdot sucks. Have a bagel.
Something similar is happening in another groundbreaking UK Internet case due to be heard soon at Northampton Crown Court.
Regina vs Buckley is a criminal prosecution in which a regular UK contributor to newsgroups, Chris Buckley, is being prosecuted under the Telecommunications Act 1984.
Sending posts to Usenet from a dialup account or leased line considered to be part of the Public Telecommunications Network (which varies from ISP to ISP; some are, some aren't) including the word "f*ck" is, believe it or not, a criminal offence in the UK.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991116-000007.html
* Refuses to move the post, and then risks prosecution; or
* Removes the post, and actively censors its newsgroups.
As soon as you do the former, you are taking a huge risk - you basically require someone to make a legal judgement call, on what is an EXTREMELY subjective area, and if they get it wrong (or not even wrong, just different from the court it then goes to), you pay masses of compensation.
As soon as you do the latter, you have exercised editorial control over the group, and lose any right to argue that you are merely a carrier. This makes you liable to claims that anything ELSE on the server must have been approved as suitable (the flipside of of not exercising editorial control - if you choose to, youre then liable for everything, there is no halfway house).
Its plainly ridiculous. What should actually happen is that the claimant must prove its libellous, and once this has been established by a court, ISPs should THEN have a duty to remove the item. Expecting ISP's to second guess courts is ludicrous.
What will thus happen is that ISPs will just pull any article they get 'reported' to them, and its less risky than making a subjective call. So...if you dont like a thread, just ring your ISP and give them the msgid's and they'll almost certainly remove the lot. Its ridiculous, but this is the way it'll go. This ruling was appalling.
Demon 'brought this upon themselves' by trying to resist the nanny-state view that 'everything must be edited to ensure its safe'. They took the view that the POSTER is committing libel, the ISP is no different from the Postal Service, and cannot be held to count for the content of mails. Do you sue the postal service for delivering you a mail that contains libel? No. If you tell them you suspect such a mail is going to be delivered should they be considered of committing libel if they deliver it? Of course not.
And thats not even going into the specifics of the 'Demon actually published the documents by holding them on their servers, and this is their liability' rubbish. Just consider what this means for email if it gets enforced all over....
AC (ex Demon)
>Please please please could we make the distinction between the UK and England here.
Yes we can. Repeat after me.
"British by birth, English by the grace of God."
Heh.
The BBC article is quite misleading in a few respects. Firstly, the article wasn't posted via Demon - Demon weren't even LG's ISP. Demon were also not the largest news provider - JANET (the academic system) was. Good background of some of the legalities can be found here
Another interesting point was that by the time LGs lawyer contacted Demon, the post had been expired anyway.
LG also has a history of libel actions. From the link above
This matter was discussed extensively in the Demon news groups (demon.service in particular). During this serveral incidents occured
1. LG was discovered to have systematically removed every post that he had ever made from deja.com
2. Deja had a copy of the post that was libellous, although this was later removed.
3. People posted a link to the post, and Demon and the posters were subsequently threatened with libel suits.
4. Demon banned the posters of the "libellous" URL from posting via its servers without a written undertaking that they would no repeat the libel. This was so badly worded that a few people, some of the lawyers, refused to sign.
What is left after all this is basically a kooks charter - anybody complains about a posting and it is history. The nature of net news is that it is expensive to operate given the current volume, a minority interest (I'd reckon a majority of net users have no idea what it is now), and with this result means that ISP will have little option but to remove allegedly libellous postings - the risk reward equation is too unbalanced to permit any other option.
A very depressing day. Unfortunately, with the current law in the UK it was inevitable. The only possible defence in UK law (innocent dissemination) dies as soon as you are notified about it.
Bearing in mind the subject matter, I think that I'll post this anonymously: I don't believe I've said anything libellous, but I could still be threatened never-the-less.
During telephone conversations with Dr Godfrey in 1999, he informed me that had Demon Internet even had the decency to respond to his several communications by fax, faxing by return instructions as to how to format and send a valid cancel, he would have considered that an amicable and acceptable settlement of the matter. They did not. Since the UK Defamation Act 1996 (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1996/1996031.htm) is clear in its meaning and not open to much in the way of misinterpretation, they brought this situation entirely upon themselves.
While we are making corrections this article at the BBC points out that he was only awarded 15,000 pounds, however Demon have to cover his legal costs which could reach 200,000 pounds. Demon will not have to pay this until they have appealed, etc, etc. You have to questions someones motivation who will spend 200,000 pounds because someone said something nasty about him.
15,000 pounds = 25,000 dollars
Thank you for pointing out the differences between the Scottish Law system and the English/US/Austrialian law system. Not a lot of people know that ;)
There is an interesting point in here though... Demon used to be an English company but was bought a while back by Scottish Power for their Scottish Telecom subsidiary which is now known as "Thus(tm)" (Nearly as stupid as Inprise). Of course Demon didn't move their NOCs up to Scotland (too damn expensive for little gain) but in a case like this would the defamation claim be held under English Law (because the servers & claimant were in England) or under Scottish Law because the company was Scottish?
Or maybe it's all irrelevant because it happened before the buy out?
The point here is that demon were told that there was defamatory material and refused to take it down.
So if I say your posting has defamatory content and tell Cmdr Taco to remove it and he refuses, can I get $400K from him? Sweet! It was the plaintiff, not a judge, who requested the removal.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I suspect Uri was being sarcastic.
Well, from the previous quote, I'm guessin gthat slashdot is his next target
Strictly speaking, the people of the UK aren't citizens, they're subjects. Subjects of Her Majesty.
Not that it makes a world of diff'...
--
"Five pounds to get into my own bedroom? What have you done? Turn it into a roller-disco?"
sorry, sorry.
Deleted
But with the rest of the Internet instead...
I think there must be some sort of dangerous mind altering fumes pervading the houses of parliament.
Deleted
Free speech doesn't include libel or slander.
Despite that fact, well-established custom and netiquette dictates that experienced online users don't take these kinds of comments on USENET seriously. This is obviously quite different from the "old" world of newspapers, magazine, and T.V. media, where publishers take responsibility for what the turn out. I'd like to see that responsibility extended to the online world and have this guy go after the person who posted the offending material (if he can track him down - not very likely!)
This is another ridiculous law that doesn't take into account the impossibility of enforcement.
The plaintiff needs to get a set of leather britches in my opinion, and not let the flames or insults get to him, no matter how personally offensive they might be. It's USENET for crying out loud.
Do you really want to force ISPs to become judge and jury when they get a complaint? I see nothing good coming out of such a situation.
Cricket has rules? Why spoil it with rules?
The case was raised because of a posting to soc.culture.thai - given SE Asia's reputation for certain classes of tourists, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the possible contents of the posting.
It wasn't a flame, it was a lie. There's a million miles between the two.
Just because it's Usenet, that doesn't mean you should be able to forge a posting, making out that someone else is admitting to something that is not true.
Freedom of speech is not freedom to malign and impugn.
Sure the new RIP is heinous and the work done by the peeps at Stand is worthwhile, but don't condone the slanderer.
The net should be about making information available to all. It should also be about, where possible, making sure that that information is timely, relevant and accurate.
I don't think that ISPs should have the onus placed on them to check what's on their web-servers, news-spools or disk-space assigned to their users. They should, though, be able to take reasonable steps once potential problems have been pointed out. Demon didn't even try, that's where they went wrong. They didn't even look into the problem and say "we don't have an issue with this", they just ignored it.
If you ignore things, they don't always go away.
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
"God forbid someone threaten slashdot-style forums"
You mean besides what the guy with the Connie Chung fetish is making us wade through?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So its definately going to cost providers the money to have skilled people looking at the complaints that will come in (more than they do now).
One question: could the ISP also get sued the other way around, like if I post a perfectly legal message, the ISP removes in on request of someone else, and Im not happy with that?
The offending article was not even posted to Demon's server. It was posted somewhere else and ended on Demon's servers by way of the normal NNTP 'flood fill' distribution.
I'm confused about what Demon's involvement was. Were they the poster's ISP? Were they Godfrey's ISP? What does it mean to publish a Usenet article? Doesn't every ISP "publish" when they copy the news to their servers? Can Godfrey sue every British ISP that carried the news article?
That Demon acknowledged that they had the article on there and then refused to remove it.
By going and finding the article, they could not claim that they knew nothing about it and that they could not therefore be held accountable for it.
They would have been better off to deny all knowledge of it, and refuse to look for it. Demon would then have been in a much stronger position.
This whole thing started out because a few people thought Dr. Laurence Godfrey was a jerk.
Now, millions of people know Dr. Laurence Godfrey is a jerk.
Somehow I doubt that was his intent.
Alan
This case does not indicate that ISP's need to begin monitoring content on their web pages. This case does not indicate that anyone can be sued for calling someone an idiot on your web page. What it indicates is that an ISP can be held accountable for illegal material hosted by their web servers (e.g. defamatory slander, which would be illegal in any printed form) IF they are aware of it (and if they have been notified of the content in question, that counts as awareness). If they hadn't been informed it was there, or they shut it down immediately when notified, the ISP would have been in the clear.
So flame away, ye blockheads, and next time think for yourselves a little.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
First off, America isn't all that great!! In terms of wealth and that lot of crap, sure it is, but in terms of everything else, what in the **** are you thinking? Hello!! Our children slaughter their own schoolmates! That makes US the greatest nation in the history of the world?! Being the most "christian" doesn't make us any better either - hello, religion promotes discrimination and racism, you think that makes us good? And freedom is a load of horseshit. (Just my 2 bits. :p)
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
that are crossposted to more than one newsgroup, irrespective of content. I haven't hacked a
file in several years, but at one time one could filter out nearly all of the noise in any
number of clever ways. Making this feature available in a user-friendly (read: GUI I suppsoe)
fashion for an average USENET app shouldn't be all that difficult.
And, in fact, is available in all good Windows GUI newsreaders,and likely most Unix ones as well. I use Agent under Wine at home, and have a good set of filters which take care of most spam, and even most lame spam follow-ups. It's even possible to noticeably reduce the spam in the pr0n groups with a few intelligent filters.
The issue seems to have been the ISP's refusal to remove the defamation.
Thus, the new burden is not to monitor Usenet, but to remove defamatory material hosted locally.
You're forgetting that the ISP is the one that's loaded with money, not the individual(s) concerned. If you wanted to sue, who would you go for?
</cynicysm>
(Amazing to see a Slashdot slave posting!)
That's neither here or there! If I committed a crime in London then i'd be tried under English Law, even though I'm a Scot.
The Duchy of Lancaster is normally touted around with the same quasi-country myths as Berwick.
As for The CI, IOM, ... these are essentially British territories/dominions are have legal systems based on English Law - there 'supreme court' is the House of Lords in London.
As an interesting aside, 'Berwick upon Tweed' should probably be known as 'Berwick in Tweed' if you treat Multi Map as gospel!
Demon Internet is the publisher of Usenet?
I guess the only thing Brits can get right is music.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
About 10 years ago I regularly read some newsgroups like soc.culture.german where Laurence Godfrey was hated to death for his anti-german postings.
No, I will not post anonymously - why should I fear to express my opinions freely?!?
Is this the world we created?
Actually it's under UK law that Demon are held responsible, not English, though they were tried in an English court (Demon is owned by a Scottish company)
Faye
This is not entirly correct, not all Free ISPs require caller-id, there is one that allows access to everything without it but the name doesn't spring to mind however a bit of searching should dig it up.
Even freeserve allows non Caller ID if all you want is web and e-mail.
IANAL Yes this is exactly the same in the UK.
Newsnight just ran with this story as the leed. The actuall had the bloke on the TV trying to defend himself along with some punter from 'The Federation for Free Speech on the Internet in the UK' (Or something like that).
At least Paxman had done some research for a change and pointed out that Dr Godfery had made of bit of a name for himself by doing things like this, however the initial video was the usual Newsnight one-sided story completly missing the point.
The free speech bloke made some intesting points though and the whole think managed to make Dr Godfery look a bit of a fool. YAY.
Why should ISPs monitor Usenet traffic ? If this case requires someone to remove a posting when they're informed of it, they only have to respond to such information - not actively seek out defamation.
> ... sue the inventors of the internet ...
But does Al Gore have enough money for all those court cases???
How do you perform a "valid" cancel of someone elses post on Usenet? Even though it's entirely possible to cancel someone elses message (well, not really, you can send a cancel message, but a lot of servers won't honor it), that's not the way it's supposed to be done. You're supposed to cancel your own messages and merely _reply_ to the messages of others. ....). That sort of thing has been done on Usenet a lot too. And it's wrong. And it makes people very angry. Not just those people who are being attacked, but also those of us who spot what's actually happen as well-meaning if misguided people post things like "I just mailbombed this scumbag". All that said, I don't think that you should be able to sue any ISP whose news server that stores or forwards such messages. Even if they have a policy which says that they don't automatically cancel messages at other peoples request. No-one has the resources to monitor that kind of volume. And, they shouldn't be monitoring it anyway. Sure, I understand that libel is not free speech, but most of what's on Usenet is free speech (ok, technically, most of what's on Usenet at the moment is spam, but if you ignore the spam then what's left is mostly free speech) and treating everyone who posts on Usenet as a potential "speech criminal" is a very bad thing. I don't know what's going on; I thought that there was a general concensus among people that Fascism is bad.
It seems a little odd that someone would do this. I'm not sure what the defamatory statements made against this man in his own name were, but a similar sort of thing has been done on bathroom walls for many years now (for a good time, call
Actually I have other reasons for disliking Demon - having to pay for something and them then taking the tenner a month and squandering it on quake servers, for example, which I do not particularly want, that sucked. And they're pathetically beaurocratically incompetent, too - I've been for 2 job interviews with them which they've screwed up. And they can't even close down an account without appearing incompetent either. But enough of that.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Another interesting example: freeserve and telinco. Both pick up your outgoing SMTP and/or web stuff and feed it through their own mail server and/or web cache as appropriate. Taking SMTP, this is protecting people against the effects of the DUL, except unfortunately it's also maintaining folks' ignorance of the DUL. (If you knew your ISP was censoring your mail based on the IP# it came from in such a blanket ban, would you still use them? Quite.) It's just that I consider it preferable to do like spamcop do, and "prevent spam through technology not legislation" - as a general principle. Legislation (as an approach) is so out of date and crabby it's incredible.
I'm not saying any of the ISPs in the UK are ideal - arguably quite the opposite, that there's always a catch somewhere. But I suggest losing freedoms for a tenner a month isn't worthwhile.
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Thank heavens I'm not with Demon any longer!
No good comes from pandering to folks who can't cope with "defammatory postings" at all. You should be allowed to flame away to your heart's content, IMNSHO - if you don't like being flamed, don't go out of your way to deserve it!
While you're at it, pay a visit to Stand.org.uk, and if you're UK-based send your MP a fax (preferably GPG-signed, too).
How do we go about getting the government out of the 'Net once and for all? Anyone got a small island to spare?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
All is true, EXCEPT!, Demon Internet is a SCOTTISH company. Blurs the lines a little at least.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
That should be "British", not "English" in the Slashdot submission. England is just one of the four parts of the United Kingdom, or one of the three parts of Great Britain (ignoring odd stuff like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands).
Damn Yanks can't even get the geography right - we should never have given the colonies away...
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
s/hampster/hamster/
Always take the 'p' out of hamster....
-- The Flying Hamster
I think you're mixing up two different incidents. As I understand the case itself the post was on the Demon (as well as many others) news server. What I think you're refering to is the mass TOS'ing of Demonites posting to demon.service quoting URL's relating to the case.
-- The Flying Hamster
Unfortunately a lot of people seem to think that 'free speach' means that they are entitled to say/do what they like without any come back...
Welcome to planet earth.
-- The Flying Hamster
Gee, reminds me of the Sagan case - Should we just refer to Laurence Godfrey as Butt Head physicist?
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
maznaz wrote: " this ruling affects the UK so go England is hardly appropriate, I'm sure the poster knows the difference betweent the UK and England but a lot of idnorant people read these articles."
I left the original poster's comment intact, but I did put UK in the head. You're right though; so I hope your post gets bumped up as informative / insightful.
Cordially,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Actually, now I am secretly glad I didn't try to "correct" the England part;) all these other posts are revealing intricacies I didn't know about re. Scottish vs. English vs. Berwick Upen Tweed (wherever that may be!). Now I'm sorry I even put UK in the head! Sheesh ...
(But how will this affect my sanchitha?)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Don't forget that the DPA was amended last year and signficiantly tightened. Even before then they had been very succesful in reforming the worst industry practices.
Going back to the Godfrey case I just they could get whoever drafted the DPA to come and rewrite English Libel law - especially as it applies to ISPs. It doesn't to anyone much good when what the law says and practical reality are so much at variance.
AJB
... is to devise - if it's possible, or get a prove that such a system is - alas - impossible of real anonymity on the 'net (two-way) for everyone who (by whatever reasons) wants it.
;)
Something as elegant as open-key encryption and - important moment - the system that would be "law-proof" i.e. the thing that can't be banned by design.
Smth akin a net of SSL-gateways or whatever.
The tricky moment is to put enough "interest" behind this from different parties..
Uhm.. I guess I don't put it quite clearly
You see - INet by itself is a thing that every fascist/communist/bastard government (and there're none others left) would like to ban/close/prohibit ASAP. But OTOH there's quite some money interested in keeping it. So - as you see - we have it still alive (more or less).
Now step 2 needed: we should get rid of the sniffers/trackers/blackmailers and stuff... I feel there's also can be quite a lot of commercial interest. The task is to direct it in the right way...
Any ideas how's this possible?
PS: Should it be written into constitution that The State (government and stuff) has the same rights as a citizen? That is - if you are not allowed to kill or steal why should gov. have these "rights"? Ahh... ethics. So old-fashioned...
:-/
Does anyone have a pointer to the offending posting that started this?
It might be nice to, ooh, I don't know, get it on a T-shirt or something!
Or so they said in ~90 when I first saw usenet.
Best Slashdot Co
Female Prison Rape in NY
Oops! I wasn't being very clear, was I? No, they genuinely are good, from my experience, though you're right it would have been more appropriate if it was sarcasm.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Now I feel much better for not trolling into alt.magick (They can't SPELL, but they can SPELL!) with an answer along the lines of: Oh! That's easy! I just tap Manticore and avoid your Elvish Prince with my Chaos Orb. If it's a Black Deck, though, I would be using my sleeved Regenerative Whirlwind for +4 Mana if you tap Barren Land!
Kibo tempted me to do it, but I resisted.
Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him. * -** *-** --- *-- - **** * *-*
funny you mention your favorite newsgroups. Many moons ago I used to hang out on alt.mcdonalds, seeing is that I used to be an ex-McDonald's employee. I shared stories with fofmer and current McD's coworkers. Then these McSpotlight bastards showed up, and proceeded to flood the newsgroup of their potest against the mighty McEmpire. Suddenly 99% of the posts were just announcements and drivel from them, with no respect to the group's regulars.
I laugh as society burns!
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Personally, I don't see how this is any different than a TV station which refuses to pull defamatory advertising. Just because it's the internet does not mean that you somehow have a license to broadcast defamatory materials.
That's the whole point. It's not the ISP that's doing the broadcasting. They're just the medium being used by the broadcaster (the poster).
And if you don't see the diff between TV stations and ISPs, consider:
TV stations create their own content.
ISPs create the space in which OTHERS can create content.
It's pretty clear to me that it's not an ISP's job to censor content that someone may or may not consider "defamatory". If someone has some legal issue with posted content, it should be taken up with the originator of the content, not the messenger (the ISP).
Burgatronics
Do Not Read Burgatronics... It's Evil
why didn't Demon fight the matter? .
well maybe the phone companies should pay up because the offensive material traveled over there "line"
laws like that this are not helping the online world but killing it . Britons already have it hard enough with timed local calls.
www.burgatronics.net
Burgatronics
Do Not Read Burgatronics... It's Evil
It is clear even from the slashdot article that the complaint was about a refusal to kill the posting once alerted to it. I don't see how that could be interpreted to mean UK ISP's must now monitor all posts. It means they'd better kill defamatory posts if the victim of the post complains, that seems perfectly reasonable.
Just put yourself in the position of being defamed like that and the ISP simply telling you they don't give a damn and are going to keep sending out the misleading info. Demon are HUGE in the UK so this would have gone out to a LOT of people.
Serves Demon right. Maybe next time they'll listen to the victim.
*snort*
That's partly because our people don't care that much, and cheerfully ignore the documents we DO have.
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.
-- President William J. Clinton, March 22, 1994
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Perhaps you should read the article?
ufdraco
How is an ISP to know if something is illegal? ISPs are better at providing bandwidth than acting as judge and jurry.
Did their admin even read the offending post? If he didn't, he (and therefore the company) didn't take the reasonable standard of care, and he's liable.
If he read the post, found it to be libel after consulting a lawyer on the issue, had the ability to remove it, and did not, he didn't take the reasonable standard of care, and is liable.
If he did not have the ability to remove it, did he contact somebody who did? If he didn't effectively pass the buck, he didn't take the reasonable standard of care, and is liable.
This is all assuming that the English law is worth a sack of dingo's kidneys. Which it isn't, but what am I, a lowly Canadian, gonna do about it?
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
This long-running case may be overturned on appeal anyway. However, the governement's falling over itself to be nice to ISPs, so it'll probably legislate to protect them if the precedent is set by the courts. :-)
-----------------
Also, Tim, get a grip on your English / British distinctions. The British Broadcasting Corporation, which is state-run, covers news in the separate legal jurisdications of Scotland and "England & Wales". The British parliament in London has recently set up subsidiary parliaments in Scotland and Wales, but there is no English subsidiary. Its not terribly important, just irritating.
So, does this mean that the phone company is responsible for things that I say over the phone to people?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
You're never safe from encroachment upon inalienable human rights, no matter where you are. The protection of your God-given rights is a continual fight that will never be won, because as long as there are men who seek to be free, there will be others who desire to enslave them. Human nature will never be stamped out in the foreseeable future. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
I do not say that ISPs should be responsible of every bit and byte they transmit or broadcase. But they should have obligation to remove illegal material. Whether the request to do so should be a court order or just a letter from some other authority or pissed-off company depends on the level of facism your country has adopted...
English libel law is far worse than US. And yes, that is saying something.
Check out what happened to LM recently, or Count Nicolai Tolstoy earlier in the century. Apparently, in England at least, the truth is not an allowed defence against libel charges.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I would suspect that given LG's legal background, a good deal of those legal costs are his. In that situation, if Demon have to pay his legal costs, they will actually be paying him...
Actually it's under English Law so it probably only covers England and Wales.
IOW, if someone went around calling up people telling lies about someone, can the telephone company be sued for allowing calls to be placed?
...responsible for defamatory material if they do not take reasonable care to ensure such material is not published, and if they do not remove such material when alerted to it.
No, they can not. Read the article!
Now, how could a phonecompany be sued for neglecting to do the latter (as is Demon Internet)?
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
From the article:
"Under English law ISPs are not held to have been the publishers of defamatory material providing they satisfy two criteria.
"They must prove they took reasonable care to ensure such material was not published, and once alerted to a problem, took steps to resolve it."
...
"He said he asked Demon to remove the message but the ISP refused. The message was copied to its servers around the world and many others containing newsgroup messages."
In other words, the issue is not that the ISP didn't monitor and censor its content, but that it refused to remove a libelous message when requested in accordance with the law.
This provision requiring removal of offensive messages is still offensive to those of us who favor free speech, but it is far less onerous than a requirement that the ISP be aware of every posting and remove any that strike its hypothetical censors as libelous.
No sig? Sigh...
Anything but cricket...
As well as Berick Upon Tweed, there's the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man IIRC. I'm not sure how much of English law covers these places. Does anyone know exactly?
If somebody sues Freeserve I will laugh myself silly. And probably contribute to the fees.
ObOnTopic: Can I sue Laurence Godfrey for the difference between the cost of my Demon subscription now and the cost it will be when they pass the $400,000 on to me, the customer?
Incidentally, the BBC World Service quoted the financial figure in dollars without even mentioning the sterling amount, which I found a little bit odd since it was a British company reporting on a British trial.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
I was under the impression that free speech was a good thing even if some people don't like what you're saying. It could just be me though....
would the telephone company be liable?
IOW, if someone went around calling up people telling lies about someone, can the telephone company be sued for allowing calls to be placed?
What has changed? The content of USENET posts will degrade, kept alive only by the informative stuff in the comp.* groups. As discussion forums move onto the web (like slashdot), I predict that nobody will over even remember USENET. This is just one more nail in the coffin.
God forbid someone threaten slashdot-style forums.
Gosh!!
Among all folks it had to be Godfrey to win such a settllement. How patently absurd!
Godfrey used to be a known Usenet troll who held strong contempt for (IIRC) Germans and Thais and used to tell these opinions freely and in most deliberate offensive ways in the respective Usenet groups soc.culture.german and soc.culture.thai.
Obviously the English legal system has gone mad once more...
The damages were only 15,000 pounds which is about $24,000, the rest of the sum was for legal costs, amounting to about 230,000 pounds, so you can see who got the result in this case!
My UID is prime!
I thought that Scotland had a separate legal system...?
It saddens me that the courts have decided to find Demon guilty in this issue. For those who don't know, the complaint was not about a flame but a defamatory remarks that were spoofed to come from him in soc.culture.thai. He allegedly notified the helpdesk that the messages had been posted and the agent he spoke to did not remove them for him.
Having worked on that helpdesk at the time I don't know anyone who would have removed them. We were used to the policy that Newsgroups on Demon were fully uncensored and to remain a passive provider we did not carry out any modification of the feed unless reported as being illegal by the IWF. Anyone reporting illegal material were asked to email a report to abuse@d.n and it would then be looked at from there. The helpdesk were not expected to carry out any of the duties that Godfrey asked for and were right not to carry them out. At the time of the complaint Demon Internet was considered to be one of the best,innovative and most technical ISP's available so it's a shame that one person's greed can put an end to that. (It should be noted that this was not the first Internet Libel case Dr. Godfrey has attempted)
This has now killed off the idea of freespeech and will almost definately kill of usenet in the UK (Who would risk carrying a newsgroup now?).
But Demon are owned by Thus who were formally Scottish Telecom who are part of Scottish Power. So I think UK is more appropriate.
Dr Godfrey didn't sue because he was flamed. He sued because somebody posted a spoofed defamatory email supposedly coming from Dr Godfrey in a news group.
I don't know why he just didn't send a cancel like he was advised.
Why do people get so concerned about libel on Usenet? Stop and think about it.
1) The source of the information (lies) was anonymous. How many people trust anonymous sources?
2) Usenet is hardly a trusted media source. The situation would be different if The Times posted information from an anonymous source (although it's highly unlikely they ever would.)
I'm not sure how libelous(sp?) information could be damaging when neither the person (anonymous) that posted the information or the media source hosting the information is trusted. ie. Who's going to believe it?
Everyone is out to sue somebody to make a quick buck....
There'll always be borderline cases, but I have seen spiteful, deliberate racism, slander, death threats and other crap coming from Demon (and other UK ISPs) with nary a warning in sight. The Free ISPs are particularly bad and it should be stamped out right now.
Dear Sir,
I am writing to inform you that all discussion
messages published on the slashdot.org web site
are libelous, except those written my myself.
Please pay me more money than I deserve or
remove said messages.
Thank you for your co-operation.
Bill, no relation.
...how this affects the rest of us with 'free-speech' and the suchlike. Maybe we can all go out to bankrupt our ISPs by posting anonymous comments about politicians, pop-stars and the like, then sitting back and watching everybody sue!! Then maybe Demon will sue the inventors of the internet for not preventing this from happening in the first place - the possibilities are endless.....
Does it also affect Scottish Law though? That's a different legal system I believe, so UK would be inapropriate. I think it covers England and Wales though, so English would be also wrong.
And then there's the problem of Berwick Upon Tweed. Who's laws do they fall under?
It wasn't a flame, it was a forgery. People do not have the right to claim others have said something that they didn't. I think this is also the case under US law.
it was a froggery.
No, a froggery is where you have to force a frog across a busy road. Illegal under the last creulty to animals act.
But they were asked to remove it, and it is quite feasable to remove it from their own servers, although this would also be pointless since by that time it would have propogated to other servers.
It also probably would have come back again, but thats somebody elses problem.
No, I think they're both as idiotic as each other, but each has its own special areas of supreme idiocy.
Thank you drive through
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I can see posting threats or breaking laws like that. But flaming someone ... come on ... you've obviously never driven in a big city in America if you really think something someone types will upset you. I mean you get a bit to close to someone and BOOM you just became lower than dirt. Also there's that whole fact that americans like to put down and flame peole. It's the american way. Look at Jerry Springer. Great show ... these people come on to just bash each other and for no apparent reason except they can. Now that's america ... we took free speech and said goodbye to english rule quite a bit ago ... looks like we did something right.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The Labour Government has made voluminous noises about its wish to kick-start the UK economy with e-commerce. At the same time, different parts of the UK apparat are engaged in 'synchronised foot-shooting' mode.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill : - this could criminalise anyone using encryption. Not a great start for e-commerce - strike one
This ruling means that ISPs like Demon now have to monitor all content. OK, IANAL, but I accept thatlibel is a bad thing. The problem is a law which is out of touch with the digital age. This will make ISPs in Britain uncompetitive. They will have to move their server-space and companies out of the UK - strike two
British Telecom still hold the monopoly on telecoms in the UK, particularly to homes. Despite pressure from the government, they are still dragging their feet in rolling out technologies such as ADSL and even in relinquishing total control of the local loop - strike three
In terms of building the e-economy on the UK - we are dead in the water at present. The rest of the world will have to start without us. We'll catch up later, no doubt on terms dictated to us at that time.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
Our current laws (and, I suspect, the UK's, as well) do more to support the "underdog" than anyone else. Although the original intention was probably good and honest, America's legal system has begun to support the individual consumer so much that it is almost impossible to defend one's self, once the media turns its guns on you. And those cases that aren't actually fought in court, and in the limelight, are usually settled out of court to the underdog's specifications anyway.
Probably, anybody taking business law courses will agree with me. See also: case of woman spilling coffee on herself and suing McDonalds. We all know that story.
In the same category, similar things happen on a closer, individual basis when someone is accused of rape but not convicted; the underdog still manages to defame and ruin its opponent in the end. It doesn't really matter who won or lost the case. More often than not, the accuser, the underdog, wins out no matter what the outcome.
The upshot is the downtrodden get a leg up so they can stare anyone down.
And in an effort to make a quick buck or satisfy some self-centered need to be vindicated for an offense, people are tending to chase after the most attainable victim instead of the right one.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
It's "Your mother was a hampster and your father smelt of elderberries." You got it backwards ;-) Great movie!
"Go sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up here"
This really sucks, I don't use Demon anymore but I did and I hate seeing this happen to them. Again our Government spouts on about pushing the UK full steam into e-something_or_other and lets things like this happen. Clueless.
Lets hope the news of a new Bill of Rights changes this, the last thing we want is to have a legal system similar to the US where people seem to sue for someone looking in their general direction.
Quote: "The case now threatens to put a huge burden on all English ISPs as they could be forced to monitor all material trafficking through their systems"
Do these sentences seem contradictory to anyone else? Nowhere here is there any suggestion that Demon should have monitored UseNet, the story is quite specifically about Demon refusing to honor their legal duties once alterted to them.
OK, so slashdotters may not agree with the law, but to say that this puts such a huge burden of monitoring on English ISPs is quite simply bullshit.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
When the article says this cases was settled does it mean that the UK Court found for the plantiff or that the parties settled out of court?
In U.S.A. law a case settled (out of court) carries no weight of precendence for future cases. Is this the same in UK law?
The case hinged on the fact that Demon kept the article on its news spool. If any British user wants to read libellous Usenet postings, the answer is to do so through an American news feed, which is not that difficult to organise. Mr Justice Morland's opinion, read carefully, shows that he thought Godfrey an aggravating kook, who none the less was libelled. English libel law is horrible. Trust me: I'm a journalist. But Demon's liability arose only because they kept the messages on their news spool even after being warned not to. Had the libel been in email Demon would have been safe. I don't see either that they could have been sued simply because their subscribers were able to access it on Dejanews, or some random web site. But it remains true that this will have a chilling effect on British ISPs. There is a story this afternoon that Outrage, a gay pressure group, has just had its website hosed because the provider was worried they might at some future date use it to libel someone. But sites like that will just move offshore. The real trouble is the expense and unpredictablity of British libel law.
OOo word count at http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/bugs/oo_macros.
According to this :- A landmark libel case involving an Internet Service Provider's liability for postings has reached an 11th-hour settlement.
The trial of the first of two actions brought by physicist Dr Laurence Godfrey against Demon Internet Ltd was due to start in the High Court in London on Monday. It would have been the first major contested Internet libel action to come to trial in this country. But Mr Justice Eady and was told that Demon had now apologised and had agreed to pay Dr Godfrey £15,000 damages plus his legal costs of £230,000.
Demon settled out of court!
That's right, they didn't stand up for themselves, and all internet users, in the high court but wimped out at the last minute and paid up!
Hopefully the next ISP to find itself in this fix will stand up for their rights and the rights of all their users, and not just cave in and roll over with their tails between their legs like Demon have.
I need to find myself a new ISP... What with this and the spam exploit Demon have lost my favour.
"Information wants to be paid"
In late May a small number of Demon users posted articles which contained a URL for an article stored in the US-based Deja News archive of Usenet articles. A few posted the URL directly, others managed to do so by quoting a previous article. The referenced article on Deja News quoted the text which is at the centre of the court action mounted against Demon by Dr Godfrey.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Now go a-way, or I will taunt yuu a second time-uh.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
But wasn't it the case that the 'defamatory' post was actually on a deja server and the demon server posts in question contained only URL's to deja? From reading the post on demon's site I'm led to beleive that the problem is deeper than just cancelling news posts on your (the ISP's) own server.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Dr Godfrey posted the message
With this as a precedent, not only are libelous comments being held against the ISP rather than the user, they're being held against the ISP *by* the user.
further, he claims that he would have been satisfied if they had given him information on how to post a cancel message? This information is publically and easily available - search DejaNews or the rfc'.
Dr. Godfrey sprayed graffiti on a public wall, realized he got seen, was embarrassed, and (successfully) filed suit against the owners of the wall because they said people could spray graffiti there and refused to clean up his mess.
This defines the term chilling effect
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I will however drop the suit for a mere $30,000 and a chance to date Nitrozac . . .
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
However: Reasonable Steps could well be a clause in the Terms of Service which states "You accept full responsibilty for any publishing of defamatory material made using your account". This the passes the buck to the customer. This brings me to a second point:
Anonymity. At the moment, it is extremely easy to open an account with most ISPs in the country as these ISPs don't bill you directly. Instead part of the cost of the phone call you make to the ISP is passed on by the telecoms provider to the ISP. If the ISP needed to make sure the customer was liable then a whole load of checks would have to be made to ensure that you were who you said you were.
In all then, a bit of a blow for the public in general as the number of people signing up to use the net for the first time may well be put off by the stringent identity checks that ISPs could well impose on them (it's worth noting that unmetered ISPs such as BTInternet wouldn't suffer from this as they have billing details and credit card nos.), and a blow for the ISP as costs could increase as a result of this ruling.
--
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
Who is going to define the rules & guidelines by which the ISP should monitor their traffic. Or, when is something offensive, and when is something considered as free speech?
This is once again an example of how the spirit of the (old) internet is being destroyed
So what? Its still like suing the owner of a building for some graffti on their wall. Anyone can post anything to newgroups thats thier purpose, power and lure. If you are such a wuss that you can't handle a person with a negitive opinion of you, you are gonna have one sad and lonely life. Best to go sit in a corner with a blindfold over your eyes, your hands on your ears and some loud enya mosic playing on the background :-P
- Fight crime, shoot back.
Wanker.
- Fight crime, shoot back.
Proof that England is riding the internet horse backwards again. It's absurd to think that the ISP's can filter all the data. Close to impossible and certainly not financially profitable.
Going by this and previous rulings this scenario could occur:
Paper publishes libelous story in printed version and web version. Paper gets sued for printed version and WE get sued for web version.
This would be like suing the printers for the printed version...
Something has to be done..
Rorso.
Just saw the guy on BBC news. If he were my professor I'd skip my classes. Sanctimonious creep. Why doesn't he sure British Telecom (a fuckign useless co. if ever there was one) for making Demon's servers accewsible over the local phone loop? Heck, or Tim Berners Lee for that matter. I can't belive I have to share a legal system with people like this.
It is reasonable to respond when someone complains, otherwise let it go. ISP's can always ask their members where allegations or defamatory material comes from. The rest of the internet cannot.
-1 Libel
:-)
It's hard to pin down an exact date, but it was sometime in the mid 90's. Most of the newsgroups have become vast wastelands of spam and trolls.
A small handful of groups survived, primarily by aggressively complaining over each and every abusive posting.
Unfortunately, some ISP's (such as Demon) do not see advertising ebay auctions as actionable abuse, and it may become necessary for the surviving groups to go to a script-based moderation--allow known users to post, and hold other posts until viewed.
hawk
If there were any justice in the system (which there isn't), someone would now be able to take Laurence Godfrey to court for destruction of freedom of speech on the Internet in the UK. Preferably it should be Demon, so they get their 400,000 UKP back, and the judgement ought to disallow LG from any further use of the medium which his actions destroyed.
But the UK courts have no interest in freedom of speech, being basically a playground for the power politics of government, corporates and pressure groups. Too bad.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Still, also Demon had this supposedly illegal post on their servers. As well as many other ISPs and users, I guess. So should the complaining person go around and ask EVERY ISP, not only Demon, to remove the post? At the time of spreading the article, probably non of the ISPs actually knew they were doing so. Any legal action has to be taken on a specific instance of a post on a specific storage medium. Is there any legal obligation for Demon to inform other ISPs that they might have this illegal post coming through Demons servers?
If this does set a precedent, and ISP's do have to start monitoring traffic, we can all say goodbye to the free ISP's. It's extremely unlikely that they could afford the extra infrastructure to cope with this demand without passing that cost onto the end-user. Not that that's a bad thing, cos most of 'em suck ;)
Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.
This guy is well known for, er, um, well Demon are my ISP too, so let's just say he's well known in UK internet circles ;)
\a
--
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
More like:
-£400,000 Libel
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
Normally i'm all for pointing out the use of 'UK' over 'England' to our American cousins, however this looks like a valid case for using 'England'...
All the ISP needed to do was to TRY. This means issuing a message to have the file erased.
Would it work? Hell no.. Most servers ignore that now as it's far to easy to fake.
Thats why they never bothered.
It IS dumb on one side to think an ISP can do anything about a message once it is out.
But legally speaking they need to try...
Say like... THE DVDCCS guys saying "We have to say this for legal reasons... please erase our code becouse the DVDCCA dosn't want you to have it... thank you"
But it's not that they legally must monitor everything just that they legaly must push the big red button connected to nothing.
It's silly... but it's nothing major.. just legally required to try..
I don't actually exist.
ms
Try this or maybe this.
I think you're missing the point (IANAL) the ISP is involved when the existance of (potentially) defamatory material on their servers is brought to their attention. Just because it's the Internet doesn't mean the medium is exempt from the laws of the country the server is hosted in.
This ruling (as I understand it) does not mean that ISPs in the UK will be required to monitor their spool, however they will have to act when informed of illegal/defamatory material. Rather than just ignoring the problem.
-- The Flying Hamster
If you're talking about "privacy" - I would be careful.
:-)
In the UK we have a "Data Protection Act" and a "Data Protection Registrar" who do a heck of a lot to protect people's individual privacy. The system may not be perfect - but it has real teeth and it works. Doubleclick would simply not be allowed to do in the UK what they recently tried to do in the US.
In the USA I believe you have what is known as "Self regulation" when it comes to privacy. Viewed from here it would appear that it doesn't have any teeth and it doesn't work. Companies can do whatever they like to individuals data - until they do something so outrageous it has political consequences.
---
Oh! And anyone who hasn't tried decent "warm" beer should give it a go. The reason we don't drink our (decent) Beer cold is because it actually tastes of something nice, unlike Beer which has to be served ice-cold to hide the god-awful taste.
But be warned. Many English pubs now serve Beer which isn't fit to drink warm OR cold. So if you want to try some decent stuff ask a local first!
AJB
IANAL, especially not a UK sollicitor, but I don't think you can be sent to gaol for libel. It is a civil tort, and only carries civil penalties.
...
You could lose your house, but maybe not if you've incorporated into a limited liability company. Or if it's in your wife's name before the tort. Of course, that may have other liabilities
UK style libel has long been far far worse than US style libel: it has
long been an excellent strategy for politicians and the wealthy to sue
newspapers for true accusations, a strategy that rarely backfires.
Free speech is very badly protected in the UK.
IMO, continental Europe tends to take matters of privacy far more seriously
than either UK or US, and matters of free speech as seriously as the
US. Don't let the UK's bad law misguide you as to the state of the
law in the rest of Europe.
a) Its not a ruling, according to the article. Demon -settled-.
b) This -may- affect Wales, but we Scots have our own legal system, so it doesnt -necessarily- affect us up here.
c) Can I use Slashdot to call Godfrey a greedy, grasping tosspot or not? Just as a theoretical question, y'know...
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
Every English ISP could just drop nntp -- I'd even block the NNTP ports going out so that you couldn't even go to an NNTP server overseas unless it was on an odd port. Just to make a point.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Even if Laurence Godfrey wanted to sue for damages caused against him, shouldn't he be pursing the poster of the material and not the medium? In most cases that I've seen, the plaintiff would normally pursue restitution from the defamer and not from the media that broadcasted it on television or published in the press.
Filtering of information posted on the Internet by ISPs is also open to abuse. Imagine if a media conglomerate owning an ISP decides to start filtering out posted opinions contrary to those held by the corporation? This would cause an outrage in most Western democracies.
Being an Australian, we are about to suffer from the restrictive online policies instituted by the right wing John Howard and Richard Alston. This will possibly have a devastating impact on our already slow internet speeds (due to our geographic location to the rest of the world) and hamper the development of e-commerce as ISPs will be forced to screen all incoming data for pornographic and criminal data. Britain may also see a slow in the growth if they force their ISPs to screen their Internet traffic too for defamatory postings.
But getting back to the point of online democracy being threatened in Europe, this sets a disturbing trend as less and less people will be unable to post their opinions and criticisms without fear of being clamped down upon by an authoritarian judicial system. The best weapon to combat defamatory or racist, sexist or offensive sites on the net is information itself and raising awareness so the public can make their own minds up on what is the truth.
Governments cannot claim to be morally right and democratic on one hand, and hypocritically crush the right of to make criticisms (whether anonymous or openly)with the other. Europeans must draw the line now.
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
In england it doesn't just stop with ISP being responcible for usenet. Douglas Adams (Of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame) found himself in a spot because a christmas book he wrote. It seems that The Church of England can take you to court for Blastphamy.
The long and the short of it the law on the books was pretty clear cut. The book was pulled from circulation. He talked a bit about this at a book signing in the states in the early 90's.
Say I set up a shell script to mail a
notification for every single usenet article.
What's a news admin to do?
If it's reasonable to respond to one complaint,
but unreasonable to respond to all, where's
the line?
Dammit, how can I sue them if they are good and offer Linux support? Now flame me again with a different ISP. Doesn't anyone use UKOL?
kwsNI
Shouldn't this guy have gone after the people that were slandering him rather than the ISP that it was posted to? Or did he go after both?
kwsNI
Hey, sorry people. Guess my sarcasm went over some heads. The UKOL comment was supposed to refer to whatever big internet service that you wanted to think about for the UK. It had nothing to do with AOL, BMW or any other specific company.
kwsNI
OK, so I may be a very small fish. I'm a one-man-band (and his cat!) but I do provide free services to people - one of which is discussion forums and places for free-speech. But I will not in any way, shape or form, censor people from expressing their opinions. So it all comes down to money. If people want to sue me, then it looks like I could be off to jail for a spell. Ho Hum! At least I can count on the sensible people of the world to shout out about the injustice. Can't I? Err.. Hello? Anybody there? Dragon
that a person has to give the ISP notice that the demamatory material is on their site and the ISP has to refuse to remove it before the ISP can be held liable. This law isn't too burdensome. The internet provides people with a way to commit libel much easier than they ever could before and there needs to be some mechanism of accountability. This law requires ISP's to take reasonable steps to prevent libel, and then after doing so, should some be posted, remove it after notification. That isn't too much to ask.
Thus the situation where , say, WHSmiths (large chain of newsagents) regularly used to refuse to carry Private Eye (satirical magazine) when their covers featured people such as Robert Maxwell who were known to be fond of the courts.
I seem to have posted five times on one story ... soprry, everyone, it must have been something I ate ;)
--
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
There has long been a debate in the UK surrounding whether ISP's should be given common carrier status (such as the Royal Mail have) whereby they are not held responsible for information transmitted over their networks.
It seems at first glance that they certainly should. But at what point does that end? We can all agree that to employ people to read and make a value judgment on every piece of information sent over a network would be ridiculous. Similarly, checking a bulletin board the size of (say) Slashdot would also be a mammoth undertaking.
What about the situation of when requested to remove personal attacks against a person though, from a news server or bulletin board hosted on that particular ISP's servers?
Where to draw the line becomes a sticky problem.
The situation in the UK is further complicated by the fact that according to existing laws suurrounding censorship and libel, the "publisher" of traditional paper material can be any of; the publisher, the writer, distributors and/or stockists! This leads to a horrible situation, where a shop is responsible for the content of books that it stocks - which has lead to several raids in the UK against comic shops stocking "adult" comics.
I get the impression that this latest news does still not set a precedent saying that UK ISP's should be responsible for all the content on their servers, but rather that if asked to remove material that could prove libellous in court, they should probably try and comply. Not the best ruling, I'll agree, but not a total disaster either.
A little planning goes a long way...
Warning: this posting will reach no conclusion. Read it at your own risk. :-)
My first reaction to this was ``this is bullshit'', quite frankly. I have worked at ISPs for a couple years now, and have been a user of Usenet for almost seven years (although I've waned somewhat recently). My first reaction is that it's patently ridiculous to sue Demon over this. They should be under no obligation to remove any material. Usenet should always be taken with a grain of salt, anyway; and if Dr. Godfrey is so hot about forgeries, he should sign all his messages with PGP.
But then again, I think that someone must take some sort of action. Let's face it, digital signature technology is never going to take hold (considering even IPv6 is stalemated like crazy over here in the US), and unless we wipe the current Internet technology from the face of Earth and start anew, we'll never have assurances that forgeries are in the very least rare. Regrettably, the herd is full of people who don't have a clue that messages even can be forged, and they'll believe anything they see coming up on their screen. I doubt we could educate them about forgeries considering the fact that I see a new mass-forward-to-get-free-stuff spam every other week.
Something else I'm worrying about, which is close to OT, is that even if we did deploy mandatory digital signatures for everyone, the majority of the Internet herd would never be able to comprehend it and insecure PCs would be compromising keys left and right -- so it would be, in a word, ineffectual.
Where does this all leave us? I'm not really sure. It concerns me to see precedent like this, especially considering the hordes of bloodthirsty lawyers over here in the US grinning with glee at the idea of such a case.
The Internet has indeed blessed us with a glimpse of what free speech truly is. Unfortunately, as our audience grows wider, it seems to get less free.
LogiTech Inc. is being held liable for developing the mouse that allowed the recent attacks on popular e-commerce sites such as Yahoo! and E-bay. The DA says "Without the mouse, the attacks couldn't have happened, we need to send a message to these companies that they cannot allow such dangerous tools to be open to the public".
Seriously folks, how can an ISP be responsible for what it's users do? How can a fast-food place be respobible for somebody spilling coffee on themselves? How can tobacco companies be responsible for somebody smoking 20+ years? What we need today is personal responsibility.
Until people stop crying to other people (esp. the government) how can we have a free socity? With freedom comes responsibility. It seems we want one without the other, but, that's impossible.
And, more spcifically on this ruling, woln't this just incourage more people to post "illegal" (don't get me started...) things? If the ISP get punished and not the person, why not?
Grades, Social Life, Sleep....Pick Two.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
I can see MSFT making a shitload of cash off this... all they have to do is scan slashdot over the past 2 years for "Microsoft" and they have like 321412341 automatic cases :) (Not to mention searching on Google for +"Bill Gates" +satan)
A 1996 law explicitly allowed British ISPs to invoke an "innocent dissemination" defense in cases of libel, but the recent ruling struck down this provision.
s /story/18764.html?wnpg=all p l/pr/1999/pr1999-03-26a.html
.oO0Oo.
Laurence Godfrey, has filed 10 lawsuits in a personal crusade to try to force the Internet to submit to national libel laws. In this suit, he objected to a forged posting on the newsgroup soc.culture.thai that he claimed was libelous; the poster has no relationship whatsoever with Demon Internet, the defendant.
The decision may point to a broader trend across Europe. A draft European Commission directive on electronic commerce suggests that ISPs should be liable for similar kinds of content if they are aware of its presence.
Here is Demon Internet's spin on the story.
http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politic
http://www.dispatches.demon.net/cgi-bin/framer.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I flame you, son of an English Pig Dog. Now go away before I taunt you a second time, you silly English kn-ig-ht. Your father was a hampster and your mother smelt of elderberries.
I don't think you mean it that way around. British libel law is generally agreed to be the worst in the West. Many journalists knew very well what press baron Robert Maxwell was up to with stealing pension funds, but they couldn't afford the libel case that would inevitably follow if they were to publish it, so millions were embezzled in safety until Maxwell's fortunate death. However a dead man can't be defamed, so as soon as he was dead the whole details could be published and were quickly found to be entirely true.
It's been a mainstay of villains and scoundrels for many years. Recently it's not all been going the way of the bad guys: Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton were recent prominent losers in libel cases and Aitken deservedly went to prison for perjury after suing a paper for publishing the truth.
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Xenu loves you!
The whole premise surrounding the case is flawed, because it makes Demon special in some way when they're not, they merely reflect the state of the Usenet flood-fill.
Somebody posted an article allegedly libelling Laurence Godfrey, and regardless of through which ISP and in which country it was posted, IT WAS INJECTED STRAIGHT INTO USENET by the poster, so only the poster can in any way be responsible. Demon and every other ISP merely reflect the state of the global flood-fill, while providing the means by which posters can themselves inject their posts into the global system. Furthermore, any optimizations related to local injection prior to distribution are just that, optimizations: they don't change the model.
Demon was merely a postpoint, nothing else. They did not hold the articles in question except as a reflection of the global Usenet, so it was pointless of Godfrey to ask Demon to remove them from their own servers alone because the articles were on Usenet, not on Demon servers per se. And to have the articles cancelled across Usenet does not require any particular ISP's involvement (you can use any ISP), so Demon were not in any way specially involved even if the items were originally injected via Demon.
The whole premise of the action and of the defense was wrong, and Demon should have been advised accordingly.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
So, ironically, USENET as an archive of information is much more useful than the web IMHO, despite the fact that as a forum it is being murdered by the spammers and trollers.
Unfortunately, if USENT truly does die as you and others predict, some ugly consiquences will emerge:
It is in all of our interests to keep USENET alive. If the signal to noise ratio has grown so bad that it is difficult to use, and moderation is unacceptable, perhaps some kind of slashdot-style rating of posts, or other tweak is necessary. I believe it would be a mistake to simply dismiss what is still, even today, a valuable resource and simply allow it to die.
Unless, of course, none of us want to be able to quickly look up answers to our questions anymore on deja.com, or to post an opinion safely and anonymously that might otherwise be supressed (and no, I don't thing slashdots anonymouty is secure enough to use for anything other than the most casual purposes).
Instead of throwing our hands up and shrugging, we should be looking for solutions to the signal to noise problem which preseves USENETs overall strengths of decentralized authority, resistence to censorship, and anonymouty.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Every word you have posted is a lie. You are a Microsoft user. You are a clueless newbie who has have never even written a device driver. I recieve six death threats off you every half hour. Furthermore, you are the originator of those emails which say Bill Gates will buy a trip to Disneyland for every recipient.
On an unrelated note, I use FreeUK. They are an excellent free ISP who give free telephone and email support. They will go out of their way to support non-standard setups, like Linux, and I would heartily reccommend them to anyone.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
1. dedicate enough skilled staff to review each and every such demand, and judge whether it is justified (keeping in mind that a wrong decision could be very costly), or
2. immediately cave in and remove any posting on demand (this will also require staff effort, but requires less skill). This would, of course, reduce the level of discourse to that of a corporate press release.
What with this and Labour's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill (putting encryption users at risk of prosecution if they lose their keys), Britain looks to be dropping out of the Internet race. Sad, really.
Please please please could we make the distinction between the UK and England here. this ruling affects the UK so go England is hardly appropriate, I'm sure the poster knows the difference betweent the UK and England but a lot of idnorant people read these articles
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you have just proved that sig ads work! Email me for a written quotation.
I remember this asshole. What a jerk!
:-(
He was even a net-legend.
I guess a legend with a lawyer can set an unfortunate precedent...
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Consider the following, now that the EU is moving toward integrated laws and "e-commerce" regulations:
Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid this will push the EU to enact Union-wide laws. Why is this a bad news? Because most Europeans are not informed enough (yet) about the potential and pitfalls of Internet free speech. And, because of the weight of the EU, what it decides may well affect other countries... Such as the US. Uh Oh.
Not to mention that most Euro-MPs are complete idiots (IMHO).
Not Good. Or, as a famous Englishman would have put it: "Double-Plus UnGood". We are getting there -- we are just behind schedule...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
See this on Demon's web site for some intresting background on the case.
So, would all of you people reading this from England please flame this post and also leave me your ISP so that I can sue them? I'll split any profits :)
kwsNI