Xref: utzoo news.admin:7759 misc.legal:12399 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!maytag!lily!watserv1!watdragon!trillium!mbenglander From: mbenglander@trillium.waterloo.edu (Mathew Englander) Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal Subject: Re: Usenet and legal liability Message-ID: <18477@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Date: 22 Nov 89 20:50:10 GMT References: <25683CAB.25106@ateng.com> <10771@max.u.washington.edu> Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu Reply-To: mbenglander@trillium.waterloo.edu (Mathew Englander) Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 32 In article karl@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: > >You miss entirely the point that a forgery, a really good forgery, >wouldn't even appear to have come from its genuine source. If I were >intending to forge the posting of someone's proprietary source code, I >would see to it that the posting appeared to come from, oh, say, UCSD, >or UTexas, or Rutgers, or... The transport security holes are so >large that the real originating site can be completely unidentifiable. [...] >A good forgery of this type wouldn't claim to come from a real >individual in the first place. No human would have to disclaim >forgery; the article would claim to have come from >John_Smith@Over-There.EDU, when no John_Smith exists there. > >--Karl Well, Karl, you miss entirely the point that the vast majority of articles on Usenet are _not_ forgeries. The important questions are 1) can I be sued for libel for an article I author and 2) can my university be sued for distributing what I have written. Now obviously if an article apparently comes from John_Smith@Over-There.EDU when there is no such John_Smith, John_Smith cannot be sued. And it is reasonable to assume that Over-There University cannot be sued either since authorship is clearly in doubt. But if I or the University gets sued, and I actually did write the article in question, it is irrelevant that authorship is impossible to prove definitively -- unless I perjure myself by denying having written the article. Mathew Englander.