Fri, 08 Sep 2006

Cops raid Usenet provider over porn

SPAM has made Usenet virtually unusable. But if this legal theory is allowed to proceed it'll kill it dead:

he raid was closely watched by other Internet and Usenet providers at the time, because of the nature of Usenet: A post by any user is automatically distributed to thousands of servers at corporations, ISPs, and universities. That means, in other words, if one Usenet provider is liable for illegal content on its servers that it doesn't even know exists, any provider could be potentially liable as well.

This is akin to holding the phone company liable for threatening calls - mercifully the judge has allowed the ISP lawsuit against the police and DA to proceed, but has unfortunately not ruled in a definitive fashion to preclude such actions by the authorities in the future.

And what happens when some enterprising prosecutor gets a hold of the notion that the web should be subject to the same rules? The Internet goes away, that's what: who wants to risk criminal liability for some data they don't (and can't) even know exists?

In this week's installment, judge lets civil rights lawsuit proceed that Usenet provider filed against Pa. police after being raided.

(link) [CNET News.com]

/Technology | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time