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Internet Service Providers Not Liable for Content
biodork writes "
A bout of sanity in the courts. Prodigy is NOT responsible for defamatory material sent over its network. Further, they may not be responsible for the material posted in their bulletin boards." This case has been kicking around since 1994. Finally a real, clear-cut, precedent-setting decision.
It's all fine and dandy now that at least one court realizes that ISP's only act as carriers, and are not responsible for the content transmitted through them. Great, this is nice for us privacy freaks and all that.
But still, from the other point of view, you still haven't really solved the problem. All this proves is that you can't make ISPs trace info so that you can track down abusers. But I'm just wondering, supposing privacy concerns become priority in the future -- meaning no one is legally allowed to monitor our Net activities, store personal info, and strong encryption becomes the norm. This is all great for privacy-aware users like us. But what about people who abuse it? Is there some way to both preserve our privacy, yet not make it impossible to track down abusers when it's necessary? Or will privacy necessarily entail the impossibility of tracking down Net criminals?
Maybe some people think, forget about the abusers, as long as we have our privacy. But this is like saying, forget about robbers, let's just make sure the police have no rights to search our belongings and we'll be happy. Then how would you mete out justice to robbers? This doesn't solve the problem, it only (rather foolishly) ignores it. How about on the Net? Can privacy be preserved yet at the same time it's possible to do something about Net crime?
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
No, these two are not related at all. There is a long history of common carriers being immune to content liability. You cannot go after the telephone company because they accept a phone call to a bookie.
Napster is a different beast altogether. They are benefitting directly by supporting a file format that is widely, perhaps even predominately used for the purpose of copyright infringement. Such a benefit could well be recoverable by the infringed. This is no different from cases in the past where the movie and music industry have sued manufacturers of tape recorders and gotten fees attached to the sale of blank tapes and recorders as a means of recovering their losses.
This kind of ruling was something I was expecting for a while. There's been a large rash of blatant privacy violations that have been working their way up the courts. This precedent is a good stepping stone for other privacy violations that are on the ballot...
The courts just needed to think about it. This was, however, the obvious answer. ISP are just the carriers.
This is how I look at it:
Saying they are responsible is like saying that Ma Bell is responsible for some flame on my answering machine. Um, NO!
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
...Describing e-mail as "the day's evolutionary hybrid of traditional telephone line communications and regular postal service mail,"
Yeah, ok, it's an Appeals court, a state one. But apparently, in New York, the court is prepared to view email as similar enough to postal mail to get some of the same legal protections. Tampering with postal mail goes into federal jurisdiction, and carries some fines, maybe jailtime. Are they prepared to give those protections to email as well? Privacy may have just received a small boost.
Communication is only possible between equals
The trouble is that governments don't want the Internet to be judged by the same rules as telephone and mail.
They view it as a threat to internal security because it promotes true democracy. So they will introduce legislation so that Judges don't have to think about common law rights and precedent.
If you don't believe me, come to Australia. People elsewhere think our government is backward because of some recent policies - wrong - they are way ahead of the game.
The Aus government has already figured out that the way to curb unbridled democracy is to have ISPs running scared over draconian content laws and then to have a politically controlled internal security organisation (read secret police) legally authorized to hack into said ISPs (or any one else) and to change data on their computers.
Note that ASIO (the security org) is not answerable to a judge to get a warrant but to a political master. So if an someone hosts unsavoury political commentry that the government sees as a threat to national security (ie it threatens the government of the day or some political or economice interest) they can legally compromise the providers computers.
I guess one of the reasons that this has come up with respect to those sites is that losses are sometimes more immediate and quantifyable.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
It's a good thing there's no censorship here.
Once you "edit" comments, you take over liability for the content of that article. /. the same as editing content?
Is the moderatrion system currently in use here on slashdot
Do Moderators have "Editoral Control"?
From the article:
Describing e-mail as "the day's evolutionary hybrid of traditional telephone line communications and regular postal service mail," the Court noted that while commercial on-line services like Prodigy transmit electronic mail, they do not exercise any editorial control. It evaluated Mr. Lunney's claim in the context of existing tort precedents, and found that "these settled doctrines accommodate the technology comfortably."
I am not sure about the outcome of the case. Altern was down for quite a while, but is now back up. You now must provide an email address (that is confirmed) to open an account. There was a petition, and as the case was posted on Slashdot, quite a few people signed it. I do remember the ISP owner (it's a one-person operation, on a Linux server BTW) thanking everyone for the support.
According to the article; "Mr. Lunney, through his father, sued Prodigy contending that the company negligently allowed accounts to be opened in his name. He sought damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. " Now, should it be perfectly legal to *impersonate* someone online? This Lunney dude had the right to contend against Prodigy opening the accounts in his name. Yes, ISPs are only carriers, but they should implement stronger checks to prevent this kind of harrasment. IMHO, ISPs should be held liable for something such as a web site containing illegal content. They should also be liable for impersonation/fraud, which is what happened here. They should *not* be liable for the content of message boards, email, and other such temporary content or public forums, which is also what happened. Yadda, yadda.