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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Legalities
Message-ID: <540@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-Feb-85 16:28:12 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.540
Posted: Sat Feb  2 16:28:12 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 6-Feb-85 05:18:19 EST
References: <900001@petrus.UUCP>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 38

As those who attended the open board meeting at Dallas know, the
Usenix board seems to be pretty much considering the legal opinions 
expressed to date to represent "worst case" views.  Obviously, the more
control you exercise, the more liabilities you may have.  But as I pointed
out recently, you can't just set up an uncontrolled pipeline without
user authentication and possibly signed statements of responsibility
from submitters (this from the same person who wrote the ;login
piece).  Since resource allocation is required in any case (the 
bandwidth available is not unlimited) you only have three choices:

1) Limit by $.  You charge people to submit. If you have more
   money, you get to say more.  Period.

2) Limit by time.  Everyone gets the same space.  It doesn't
   matter what you have to say -- everyone is assumed capable of
   submitting equally useful articles.  Maybe everyone gets 5K/day
   or something.  Period.

I don't like either of these above two.  They sure don't seem fair to me.

3) Quality control in terms of removal of repetitious or illegal messages
   at the least, or more magazine-like creation of digests and other
   materials (that is, higher quality information) at the most.
   There is obviously a continuum here, with a broad range of possibilities.
   I obviously like this one.  I think it could result in a service
   worth spending your time reading.

The Usenix board pointed out that the mere existence of liabilities
isn't a reason not to do something--in this respect they wanted
to make sure that the ;login piece was not misunderstood.  Anyone
who even publishes a newsletter (like ;login!) is accepting liability
for the contents.  So are all magazines, radio and TV stations, etc.

What IS important is that the liabilities be understood.  Then the
decision regarding what level of liability is appropriate, relating
to the sort of service deemed useful, can be made reasonably.

--Lauren--