Xref: utzoo news.admin:7790 misc.legal:12414
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!mintaka!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!ka
From: ka@cs.washington.edu (Kenneth Almquist)
Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal
Subject: Re: Usenet and legal liability
Message-ID: <9928@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 25 Nov 89 08:44:11 GMT
References: <25683CAB.25106@ateng.com>
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 25

chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>   2.  Any libel or copyright infringment suit would have to prove
>       authorship.  Given the insecure nature of UUCP and NNTP, such proof
>       is impossible.
>
>   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.

It is only one possible interpretation, and in light of point number 2,
I suspect that a judge would be very reluctant to accept it.  While the
supermarket cannot be sued, the National Enquirer can be.  Given your
assumption that the author of a USENET article cannot be identified, a
more precise analogy would be if the printer of the National Enquirer
refused to disclose the identity of the publisher and then argued that
since the printer did not write the contents, the printer was not
responsible for them.  Any judge who accepted this argument would be
turning the copyright and libel laws into a dead letter.
				Kenneth Almquist

-- 
As for government "sending the wrong signal" by legalizing drugs:  let's
get serious.  Anybody still looking to the government for moral authority
is probably already on drugs.