Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!stargate!stargate From: stargate@stargate.UUCP Newsgroups: news.stargate,news.misc,comp.org.usenix Subject: Stargate Message-ID: <109@stargate.UUCP> Date: Sat, 6-Jun-87 16:38:08 EDT Article-I.D.: stargate.109 Posted: Sat Jun 6 16:38:08 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 7-Jun-87 09:48:48 EDT Lines: 282 Xref: utgpu news.stargate:158 news.misc:459 comp.org.usenix:225 This is a very long message. It is certainly true that this group has become considerably more amusing lately. But there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Of course, as should be fairly obvious, we certainly do not have the time to generate voluminous responses for every message that might appear in this or other groups relating to Stargate. To do so would leave no time for real work. There are some people who feel that reading and posting netnews is the best use they can put to their time--but many other people don't fall into that category. First, a few words about information services in general. There are a variety of companies providing data of different sorts under different conditions and at widely varying rates. In general, the lower the price the more "mass-oriented" the data will be. As the data gets more "valuable" and "directed," the price tends to go up (and restrictions on what can be done with the data may become more significant). One example is the cable service recently mentioned in this group that can provide certain newswire-type data. The presence of severe usage restrictions (no archiving nor redistribution in ANY form) and per-reader charges are an example of the sorts of factors that can enter into the picture when "valuable" data is involved. The particular example represents a sort of service that is very different from Stargate (and from Usenet in general). Their goal is to provide primarily a one-way service. They take bits and pieces (headlines, summary items, etc.) from a variety of newswires and edit them together into essentially an electronic magazine. The resulting "magazine" is very much oriented toward the general public (as are most cable services). Despite some discussion of the possibility of accepting some public submissions for transmittal over the service, it is clear that they plan to carefully limit and edit any such submissions and that sanitized newswire excerpts would continue to be the bulk of the transmitted information. Their primary goal is to provide a general information service for the masses--this is very different from the primary goals of fostering multi-way discussions and communications on Usenet and Stargate. Among the major problems with services that (unlike Stargate) require the active technical participation of each cable company is that the participating cable companies must install special equipment at each involved headend--many of which service only a few 1000 subscribers. To justify the efforts, and any involved initial and recurring costs, the cable co. must feel that in some way their revenue will be enhanced. Cable co's (referred to as ccos in the remainder of this message) are rapidly becoming a financial and even a political power of immense importance. Since their rates were deregulated recently, and since they are now increasingly free to put whatever THEY want on their cable systems, without regard to community interests, many have either drastically raised rates, restructured their systems (often dropping free channels in preference for pay channels), or both. Those that haven't done so yet are most likely planning such actions fairly soon. Some ccos have already dropped "local" stations in order to make more pay services available-- with one of the popular "drop" targets being PBS stations. This sort of trend will accelerate as the deregulation process continues over several years. Since there is usually no "local" competition for cable companies (other than home satellite dishes), deregulation will have a variety of negative effects on the cable subscriber in years to come. The upshot of this is that most cable companies are increasingly interested in pay services, not basic services. And if a cable company seems to be offering something for nothing, one must be exceptionally careful to avoid being suckered down the line. On the technical and operational front, one can depend on the general rule that if the cable company needs to install special equipment to provide a service, it will be less reliable than a service that didn't require any special actions on the part of the cable co. to support it. As for whether or not anyone really expects to get an informed answer out of a cable company about whether they are liable for this or that service under such and such conditions--well, rest assured that they generally have no idea what you're talking about but will give you an answer anyway, regardless of whether it is correct or not. The big money for the ccos has been and continues to be in the movie services--and that's where they continue to put most of their local resources (and increasing amounts of their channel capacity). The deregulation of the cable companies is one of the "sleeper" stories of the 80's--that is, it is a BIG story that hasn't really broken into the public consciousness yet. When it does, stand back! ---- Stargate chose the transmission technology it did primarily to avoid the problems of needing to have cable company involvement with special headend equipment just to pass our data. By using the WTBS vertical interval, our data becomes available in the vast majority of locations where WTBS can be received, without any special actions or special headend equipment normally being required of the local cable companies. The data is in the vertical interval and normally can be expected to pass through most cable companies' systems directly to our subscribers. For people who can't get the data from WTBS on cable, the satellite equipment required can be of the relatively inexpensive home dish type--avoiding the need to rent specialized satellite gear for spread-spectrum type systems. Stargate is not restricting the distribution of materials passed through from Usenet. Any non-Usenet-origin data that we may add to our data stream may (or might not) be restricted in some manner, depending on the situation--including arrangements made with and the desires of the entities providing such data. This seems only fair and proper. Of course, it is up to each Stargate subscriber to decide to what extent, if any, they wish to redistribute Usenet materials that come through Stargate. It is certainly the case that if such redistribution is on a large scale and sufficiently depresses the number of subscribers, the existence of the service could be threatened. To the extent that the number of subscribers is low, we are forced to set higher rates to those subscribers than would be the case with more subscribers. Our goal is to be able to LOWER the per-subscriber rates as the number of subscribers grows. More subscribers means that we can spread the relatively fixed costs of the data broadcast operations over a wider base, and so individual charges can be reduced if we get enough subscribers. This is one of the big advantages of this broadcast technology over other methods for disseminating data. Most other technologies require the addition of substantially more and more equipment (modems, ports, CPU cycles, etc.) as the number of subscribers rise. Stargate doesn't face this kind of scenario. A few words about moderators and mod/unmoderated groups. This message, and thusly the following, is not a legal opinion or advice, but it is based on a careful survey of a variety of information and discussions with informed persons. Who is liable for the information distributed in netnews articles? If material is transmitted that is illegal (e.g., obscene material under one or another state law--they vary widely, or stolen credit card numbers, or libelous material, or what have you...) who is responsible? The answer is that nobody really knows. Such issues are worked out on a case by case basis in the courts, and there are no applicable cases that can be used as reference. However, several points seem fairly clear. First of all, any liability that may (or may not) be involved with any given site, service, or moderator relating to any given material does not appear to change based on the mode of transmission. Whether the material is sent around by phone by 1000's of sites, transmitted by a packet network service, or transmitted by Stargate is unlikely to make any difference. The key is the material itself, not the manner in which it is passed around. In conventional environments, the entity ultimately held liable for "bad" material would normally be the author of the article in question. However, Usenet introduces a problem--there is no way to authenticate an article author on Usenet. Articles can be trivially forged or otherwise handled in manners to obscure the origin. There is essentially no way to ever prove who wrote a given article that originated on Usenet. So what happens when someone (be he or she a private citizen or a governmental entity) gets upset over a particular Usenet article and goes to court to try get relief? Who do they go after? Nobody can prove who the author is. In a widely distributed Usenet, it is very difficult to find an entity to target. However, as soon as an organization sets itself up as a "central" point specifically for the distribution of netnews articles (particularly if they are charging for the service) they have created such a target--themselves! Some have claimed that by saying that a service is simply passing through all material and "has no control" over the material (e.g. a common carrier) itself that they are protected from liability. This appears NOT to be a viable argument in the case of netnews-related services, particularly services which (unlike communications carriers who simply set up point-to-point connections between two customers) would be themselves storing netnews materials and acting as a distribution point for such materials directly to their subscribers. Given no way to authenticate the author of an article, courts are not likely to simply tell the plaintiff, "well, you see, the company that sells the service that collects and sends the articles out set things up so that they couldn't control it, so I guess you're out of luck since we can't find anyone else to blame." A much more likely outcome is that the service would first be requested to police the material and remove objectionable items before sending them to subscribers. If the service refused to do this, the probability of an injunction to terminate the service, probably under "public nuisance" statutes, would seem quite possible. Simply declaring yourself a "common carrier" does not yield protection from this sort of scenario or suits. The courts are going to find someone liable in such situations. If the author cannot be proven (and possibly even if they COULD be proven) and the service being paid to collect and distribute the offending material refuses to control the material (e.g. moderate!) then the odds are high that the service will find itself in a very complex situation and could find itself shut down, regardless of whether or not the author of the original article could be authenticated. Of course, even an operation that was moderating materials might occasionally have an article slip through that could cause a problem. But in those situations the operation could at least demonstrate that they had been acting diligently to try avoid such a situation, and that they weren't taking what the court might view as an "irresponsible" attitude toward the materials. Such a demonstration of diligence can be crucial! The bottom line--moderation of materials is very important, for a variety of reasons, ranging from maintenance of article quality to the other sorts of considerations discussed above. Stargate has chosen moderation of its transmitted materials for these reasons. --- We can't help but find it to be somewhat ironic that some persons consider Stargate to be a problem for Usenet. Stargate is an operation oriented toward keeping our rates as low as possible and without any goals for making big money from transmitting Usenet articles over Stargate. We know the Usenet community, are part of the Usenet community, and want to help that community deal with a variety of problems that have been growing increasingly complex, both quantitatively and qualitatively, over a long period of time. As we grow, our goal is to offer a variety of services that expand beyond the world of netnews. For example, we are exploring non-Usenet information providers (including discussion conferences and a variety of other information entities) for transmission over the Stargate system. Since each Stargate satellite/cable subscriber site is connected essentially fulltime directly to our satellite/cable uplink, we can take advantage of this "leased-line" sort of connectivity to provide a range of "time-sensitive" and other sorts of information as we evolve. Since our transmissions are sent toward all subscribers simultaneously, the range of possibilities is quite vast. Our view has emphasized quality over quantity. Some will disagree with that view--they are welcome to do so, but we have reason to believe that many persons and organizations are in agreement with our orientation in this area. Stargate Information Services is also providing other services for the Usenet community at large, including to those sites who are not Stargate satellite/cable subscribers. These non-satellite/cable services currently include the work related to the central coordination and domain database maintenance for the UUCP Zone, and we hope to also offer services that would assist conventional Usenet sites to find local mail and/or netnews feeds in their area and thusly help to optimize netnews distribution and reduce costs for the entire network. Obviously we'd like to see as many sites as possible become Stargate satellite/cable subscribers, but we realize that many sites will be unable to do so and we'd like to use our organizational resources to help optimize local connectivity and the topology of conventional netnews connections for the benefit of the network. --- Oddly, while some persons have generated flames about Stargate, it is only recently that we've seen any discussion of the large commercial services who apparently routinely take Usenet messages and make them available to their large subscriberships at a premium price, apparently also claiming copyright on those Usenet messages in at least some cases. Those companies have vast numbers of subscribers and make real money from those subscribers! And it also appears obvious that there are smaller operations who run systems which charge (on some basis, be it flat rate and/or connect time) for access to news feeds. Perhaps the reason people have flamed about Stargate is that we've been the most visible to this community--that many people on Usenet are not aware of how widely Usenet messages are distributed by various organizations. It's not our place to assert whether any other given service should or should not be doing something commercially with Usenet articles. But we do want to point out that compared with most of those other operators Stargate is a small service oriented toward helping the Usenet community, with our goal being to keep the costs involved, and thusly the subscriber rates, as low as possible. The technology we're using is uniquely suited toward this goal. We are using the 6 month experimental period, which commenced on June 1, to help determine the long-term viability of Stargate, and to help us, through our experimental subscribers, to evolve the services in an ordered and meaningful manner that will help serve our subscribers and the community at large. We hope this very long message addresses most of the issues that we've seen discussed in this group recently. As always, your questions or inquiries, via direct email to stargate@stargate.com {cbosgd,uiucdcs,rutgers}!stargate!stargate stargate!stargate@rutgers.edu are welcome. The Stargate Team Mark Horton Steve Morenberg Mel Pleasant Einar Stefferud Lauren Weinstein