Xref: utzoo news.admin:7707 misc.legal:12361 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!zog.cs.cmu.edu!tgl From: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal Subject: Re: Usenet and legal liability Summary: who filters this stuff?? Message-ID: <7059@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 21 Nov 89 16:40:32 GMT References: <25683CAB.25106@ateng.com> <10771@max.u.washington.edu> Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 37 In article <10771@max.u.washington.edu>, wcn@max.u.washington.edu (W C Newell Jr) writes: > In article <25683CAB.25106@ateng.com>, chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes: > > 5. Sites that carry a newsgroup would probably be in a situation similar > > to supermarkets that carry the National Enquirer. The Enquirer losing > > a hypothetical libel suit doesn't make the supermarkets who carry it > > liable. Of course, this is only one possible interpretation. > > You got this analogy from a lawyer? The supermarket has no role in reviewing > the contents of the Enquirer; the magazine's publisher is clearly identified on > the editorial page (as required by law). The sites have a major role in > reviewing and filtering newsgroup content, and assume status of co-publisher by > default. Say what? Do *you* read every one of the articles that comes down the line? Last I looked there were about 3500 on an average day. The notion that anybody filters this stuff is laughable. At the most a suit could claim that I acquiesced in taking some particular newsgroup. We all know that the correlation between newsgroup and article content is none too high; and in any case an article that someone would actually bother to sue over would probably appear in some perfectly reasonable group (say, something nasty about Apple in comp.sys.mac?) In any case most large sites don't even bother to exercise control over newsgroups. We periodically weed out stuff that isn't on Spaf's lists, but the contents of our junk spool prove that most of our neighbors don't even do that. I'm proud to say that I'm not a lawyer either. -- tom lane, CMU-CS news admin Internet: tgl@cs.cmu.edu UUCP: !cs.cmu.edu!tgl BITNET: tgl%cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvma CompuServe: >internet:tgl@cs.cmu.edu