Communications Decency Act Protects AOL in Lawsuit

JasonL writes "Cnet has an article on how the Communications Decency Act has protected AOL is a case of one AOL member selling child pornography to another AOL member. This may set a new standard on how pornography, illegal as it may be, is dealt with by ISPs."

Comments

Wait, explain this to me Judge...

[JoeShmoe]

Napster:

Built a service that now has millions of customers by turning a blind eye to music piracy even though it was "possible" to prevent the exchange of illegal materials by blocking access to the file names.

Result: Found guilty, guilty, guilty.

AOL:

Built a service that now has millions of customers by turning a blind eye to software piracy and child pornograpy trading even though it was possible to prevent the exchange of illegal materials by blocking access to private chat room names.

Result: Innocent?

Give me a break. According to their own internal audits, AOL had fewer than 400,000 paying member back when it overtook Compuserve as America's number one ISP. The renaming TWO THIRDS of their so-called million plus member were warez users who generated fake credit card info and used the account for several months until it was finally cancelled.

AOL knew about people gathering in private rooms with names like "warez" and "kiddie porn" but refused to block them for several years, stating they had no grounds to police private rooms. Trading flourished unhindered until AOL had around 10 million members at which time AOL simply blocked access to private rooms with "warez" or "kiddie" or "child" in them. Which of course means the traders just started using w4r3z speak instead. Not to mention the fact that AOL allow members to have five accounts with 550 e-mails each with a 15MB attachment. That's over 2GB of storage that legitamate members were supposed to use for what? And the To: and CC: field capacities were increased three times from 200 people to 500 people then over a thousand people. Who forwards to thousands of people by warez traders? That's what listservs are for. Only after becoming so far out in front of other ISPs did AOL throw a switch and suddenly prevent people from mass-downloading forwarded warez files.

The hypocracy is incredible. Obviously AOL pays more for their lawyers.

- JoeShmoe

text of CDA as passed for reference

[StandardDeviant]

To save people having to muck around on the thomas.loc.gov site too much (their search interface is horrid IMHO), here's a link to what I think (c.f. horrid interface again) is the final text of the CDA as passed. Of particular interest to this discussion would be Title II (common carrier crud) and Title V (things that excite senators,er, pr0n and stuff).

This is a big, complicated piece of legislation in which the laws of unintended consequences are in full force. That's why if you want to argue on it, you have to read the thing becuase there are so many little codiciles and amendments and stuff that what you think it says based on a soundbite level of knowledge and what it actually says may well be quite different (well, this is true of any legal discussion, but with complicated bills like this doubly so).

--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Well.. Damn..

[ShaniaTwain]

..This just *AINT* a pretty subject, no matter how you paint it. Is CDA 'good' or 'bad'? Could we just have a simple, straight-forward direction from Slashdot on the proper way to think?.. I just don't know what to say about this one.. Gonna have to check the archives to establish my POV..


-

Pedophilia

[deran9ed]

In a 4-3 decision, Florida's high court said the Communications Decency Act gives the Internet service provider, a unit of AOL Time Warner, immunity from a lawsuit filed by a Florida woman, whose 11-year-old son appeared in a lewd videotape sold by one AOL subscriber to another.

Just goes to show the lack of understanding the justice system has when assessing technology based crimes. Somewhere down the line I wonder if it had been a mom and pop ISP if the scenario would have been the same.

The mother alleged that AOL violated Florida criminal law, which prohibits the distribution of pornography, and was negligent by not knowing that one of its subscribers was a seller of child pornography and for not stopping him once complaints had been made.

Well not knowing the full details surrounding this occurance, I can say that it does take a while for something like this to be investigated, and I know this because my wife is on the board of Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia, if AOL did acknowledge the complaint and partaken in an investigation of some sort they should be held liable, and an appeal with proof of their investigation would prove the complaintants case.

"The interpretation adopted today provides a foundation for far-ranging forms of illegal conduct...which (ISPs) can, very profitably and with total immunity, knowingly allow their customers to operate through their Internet services," he wrote.

Indeed the laws regarding most computer based crimes are very broad and can easily be misconstrued, its sad however to see that judges play the robotic role of following "the book" but use little to no ethical, or humanlike qualities when dealing with any type of criminal case.

He said AOL has an elaborate system to encourage members to report child pornography.

Many people don't often understand the implications of reporting child porn and its importance, and many will often turn a blind eye on a notion someone else will report it. It can also be assessed that some may be embarrassed to report something as pedophilia out of fear they themselves may be considered pedophiles.

I've seen plenty of times people attempt to do what they feel it "the right thing" and totally screw things up for law enforcement. For example I won't name any particulars, but there is a group right now with anti child pornography intentions but their methods are wrong. Surely we would love to see child porn go by any means, and the attitudes these guys have taken is to break into a pedophile based server and delete them.

Bad move acts like these can compromise an investigation, and what some of these groups don't realize is, as quick as you can delete it, the pedophiles can quickly throw up ten mirrors. Not only did they themselves commit a crime by breaking in, the also committed the crime of evidence tampering, and the list goes on.

Personally I think some of these laws need a definite 2 year revision before things became a bit more chaotic than they are now.

Kiddie Porn

Due process, etc.

[ShaunC]

>The plaintiff told AOL about the child pornography,
>identified the criminal, and provided evidence, yet AOL
>(which has policies against child pornography) refused to
>take action.

You don't know this. AOL may well have notified the authorities that very day. But terminating a pervert's AOL account doesn't give the authorities much of a chance to catch said pervert in the act, now does it? If you notify your landlord that there's a crackhouse in your apartment complex, and the property management calls the police, the police aren't going to say "evict that guy right now." The police are going to want to set up surveillance, etc etc.

Investigations take time. The fact that AOL didn't immediately shut down the freak's account doesn't mean they're irresponsible. In fact it's quite possible that law enforcement officials wanted the account to remain *open* so that they could track that account's activities.

Just something to think about.

Shaun