Slashdot Mirror
New York ISP Held Liable For Newsgroup Content
jmoloug1 writes: "The New York State Attorney General has secured a guilty plea from an ISP for providing a newsgroup to its customers that peddled in child porn. While kiddie porn is a tough practice to defend, what is the next subject that an ISP will be held liable for due to the actions of its subscribers? Since the Attorney General is calling this a 'groundbreaking case' it's clear they intend to use this as a precedent. Do ISPs now have to monitor the content of newsgroups?" The question keeps coming up: how responsible is an ISP for content available through them?
Assuming that the details involved articles in the local news server spool, what exactly do you want the ISP to do?
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Delete the offensive articles? No problem.
Delete the offensive newsgroup? Big problem. Do you delete the entire comp.os.linux.* hierarchy because some idiot spams it with a single explicit picture? A dozen? What about the soc.motss.* hierachy? The alt.pagan.* groups? The soc.catholicism.* groups?
Oh, you said that this is different because it was (at a guess) alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen.hardcore? Have you actually looked at the content of that newsgroup? I have, before complaining to *my* ISP, and determined that there was literally nothing there (at the times I checked) which wasn't cross-posted to every other abpe newsgroup. Damn spammers! But since I didn't see anything other than "hot 14-year-old babes" who were clearly old enough to have 14-year-old daughters I didn't see any reason to contact my ISP.
On the one hand, there's nothing "there" so I shouldn't mind if the newsgroup is deleted. On the other hand, I've seen far too many people who don't understand why gay or (legitimate) pre-teen sexuality or wiccan/pagan or illicit drug information or any of a dozen other topics shouldn't also be banned. After all, "in this state sodomy is illegal (and it's against God's law everywhere)!" and "in this state the age of consent is 18 so no teenagers are fucking other teenagers and that's why the schools give absolutely no sex education lessons" and "drugs are illegal so nobody is taking them and therefore nobody needs to know how to recognize their friends are overdosing" or
Of course the ISP should remove specific articles containing obscene material. (Arguably, it should have forged a "cancel" message for it, so it would have been deleted from other servers as well.) The ISP should have probably had somebody monitor the newsgroup for a while after the complaint.
But it does not follow that it should have immediately deleted that newsgroup, or entire hierarchy, or entire fscking news server, because some of the articles were obscene.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Guh... why aren't the courts looking at the laws? I don't really understand that.
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RumorsDaily
The question at hand is this: How do we mold the early videotex environment so that noise is suppressed without limiting the free flow of information between customers?
The first obstacle is, of course, legal. As the knights of U.S. feudalism, corporate lawyers have a penchant for finding ways of stomping out innovation and diversity in any way possible. In the case of videotex, the attempt is to keep feudal control of information by making videotex system ownership imply liability for information transmitted over it. For example, if a libelous communication takes place, corporate lawyers for the plaintiff will bring suit against the carrier rather than the individual responsible for the communication. The rationalizations for this clearly unreasonable and contrived position are quite numerous. Without a common carrier status, the carrier will be treading on virgin ground legally and thus be unprotected by precedent. Indeed, the stakes are high enough that the competitor could easily afford to fabricate an event ideal for the purposes of such a suit. This means the first legal precedent could be in favor of holding the carrier responsible for the communications transmitted over its network, thus forcing (or giving an excuse for) the carrier to inspect, edit and censor all communications except, perhaps, simple person-to-person or "electronic mail". This, in turn, would put editorial control right back in the hands of the feudalists. Potential carriers' own lawyers are already hard at work worrying everyone about such a suit. They would like to win the battle against diversity before it begins. This is unlikely because videotex is still driven by technology and therefore by pioneers.
The question then becomes: How do we best protect against such "legal" tactics? The answer seems to be an early emphasis on secure identification of the source of communications so that there can be no question as to the individual responsible. This would preempt an attempt to hold the carrier liable. Anonymous communications, like Delphi conferencing, could even be supported as long as some individual would be willing to attach his/her name to the communication before distributing it. This would be similar, legally, to a "letters to the editor" column where a writer remains anonymous. Another measure could be to require that only individuals of legal age be allowed to author publishable communications. Yet another measure could be to require anyone who wishes to write and publish information on the network to put in writing, in an agreement separate from the standard customer agreement, that they are liable for any and all communications originating under their name on the network. This would preempt the "stolen password" excuse for holding the carrier liable.
Beyond the secure identification of communication sources, there is the necessity of editorial services. Not everyone is going to want to filter through everything published by everyone on the network. An infrastructure of editorial staffs is that filter. In exchange for their service the editorial staff gets to promote their view of the world and, if they are in enough demand, charge money for access to their list of approved articles. On a videotex network, there is little capital involved in establishing an editorial staff. All that is required is a terminal and a file on the network which may have an intrinsic cost as low as $5/month if it represents a publication with "only" around 100 articles. The rest is up to the customers. If they like a publication, they will read it. If they don't they won't. A customer could ask to see all articles approved by staffs A or B inclusive, or only those articles approved by both A and B, etc. This sort of customer selection could involve as many editorial staffs as desired in any logical combination. An editorial staff could review other editorial staffs as well as individual articles, forming hierarchies to handle the mass of articles that would be submitted every day. This sort of editorial mechanism would not only provide a very efficient way of filtering out poor and questionable communications without inhibiting diversity, it would add a layer of liability for publications that would further insulate carriers from liability and therefore from a monopoly over communications.
In general, anything that acts to filter out bad information and that is not under control of the carrier, acts to prevent the carrier from monopolizing the evolution of ideas on the network.
Seastead this.