Xref: utzoo news.admin:7705 misc.legal:12360
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal
Subject: Re: Usenet and legal liability
Message-ID: <1684@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 21 Nov 89 15:33:07 GMT
References: <25683CAB.25106@ateng.com> <10771@max.u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 26

In article <10771@max.u.washington.edu> wcn@max.u.washington.edu (W C Newell Jr) writes:

| It is not clear whether a newsgroup is to be considered a "publishing medium"
| in the legal sense.  If we assume for the sake of argument that it is, then the
| offended party can sue the institution, as the article's publisher, rather than
| the alleged author.  Transport level security holes aside, it's still possible
| to prove distribution, so this University, for example, could be held liable.

  The enforcability of this is *very* dubious. There is a principle that
there is no responsibility without control. Usenet has the same control
over the traffic as the phone conpanies do over their traffic (none).
Unless you postulate some responsibility for each site to approve each
article before feeding or posting it?

  I could see some possible attack on the moderator of a group who
approved an article, because there is an element of control. I could
even see a suit against the posting site for allowing the individual
access to the net. The kicker is that there is no solid way to prove
authorship, approval, or posting site. There *is* a body of technical
opinion which states that a good forgery is impossible to detect, since
bits all look the same when they come in the modem.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon