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From: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.news
Subject: Re: Evidence (was Re: Musing on Constitutionality)
Message-ID: <21207@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 29 Sep 90 17:34:16 GMT
References: <8306@helios.TAMU.EDU> <26938:Sep1814:48:2390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <4572@qip.UUCP> <1990Sep20.221955.10879@spectrum.CMC.COM>
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Reply-To: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
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In article <1990Sep20.221955.10879@spectrum.CMC.COM> lars@spectrum.CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen) writes:
>By analogy, it may not be unreasonable to hold the "publisher" (i.e. the
>owner/SYSOP) jointly liable with the poster for whatever appears on the
>bulletin board.

>Indeed, this may require that the SYSOP not allow unmoderated discussion
>except within closed user groups whose members have all signed a pledge
>of responsible behaviour and are all known to the SYSOP.

>Seems pretty reasonable to me ...

If this were the case, it would be the end of Usenet.  Further, it would
have a chilling effect on free speech via bulletin boards.  As a sysop,
I would have to be very careful to never allow anything out that was
in the least bit controversial, and would always want to err on the side of 
not allowing a message to go out unless I was really sure there was no chance
of me getting in trouble for it.  

Shouldn't the poster of the message be accountable for its contents?  

Or by your reasoning, shouldn't the phone company have to listen to *all* the 
phone conversations going on at any time to make sure nothing illicit was
being said, done or planned?  They tried this in Eastern Europe, you know.

Further, this would be a new and time-consuming burden on sysops and introduce 
potentially long delays in messages getting out.

If a sysop let a bad message go out and it was gatewayed to a bunch of other
machines, or one was forged or somehow illicitly injected into the network,
by your reasoning wouldn't the owner/sysops of all the machines the
message went to be liable?  If that were the case, it would definitely be
the end, because nobody has the resources to monitor, for example, all the
traffic on the Usenet.

I used Prodigy several times, and it is a heavily censored system, i.e.
Prodigy's censors examine every article posted before it goes into the
message base, and people on it were complaining that the censors were 
capricious, arbitrary and would not state reasons why specific articles 
had been censored.

Not only is there nothing like talk.religion.*, talk.politics.*,
soc.motss on Prodigy (they dropped a forum in which fundamentalist Christians 
and homosexuals and homosexual rights advocates were going at it, although
they claimed it was for a different reason), but you can't even mention
or talk about most products by name because advertising is a big part
of their revenue base (about 20% of your display is permanently dedicated
to advertising when using it -- ads are continually updated in this area the
whole time you're on) and they don't want anyone to get free advertising.
Consequently messages of the "Yeah, I bought a Frobozz 917 and it works really
well" are censored.  If this is IBM's view of the future of personal 
electronic communications (Prodigy is a joint-venture of IBM and Sears), and 
there is every reason to believe it is since this is what they chose to
provide, it is a bleak future indeed.  (The reason they do this, I think, is 
that Prodigy is supposed to be a "family" system.  Under your one account you 
can set up logins for your other family members.  So they don't want anything 
in there that some kid is going to read.  But that restricts everything on the 
system to a very low common denominator, namely that every message must be so 
inoffensive that *nobody* is going to be offended by it... and that is
censorship.
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