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From: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Mark Ethan Smith: For real?
Message-ID: <5343@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Tue, 6-Oct-87 23:30:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: jade.5343
Posted: Tue Oct  6 23:30:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 06:33:36 EDT
References: <378d6016.b8ab@apollo.uucp> <5261@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer)
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Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
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In article <829@qiclab.pdx.com> leonard@qiclab.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) writes:
<Larry claimed that Mark's posting was slanderous.
<Mark claimed that Larry's was libelous.
<
<Unfortunately, as Larry points out, Mark can sue him, but he can't sue Mark!
<Why? Because he has got no way to get an address to send the summons to!

This is false. Mark Ethan Smith's address is in the white pages of the
appropriate phone book. What more do you want?

<Therefore, Mark is _not_ responsible for any postings as he cannot be held
<accountable for them! 

No more accountable than anyone else on USENet, anyway.

You see, the first problem is that it's possible that era1987@violet
is not really Mark Ethan Smith. Just like it's possible that the
person posting using the name "Larry Lippman" is not really Larry
Lippman.

If I were really thinking about suing someone for a posting, the first
step would be contacting the administrators of the system to find the
name and address associated with that username/host combination.
Should they prove reticent about releasing the information (I hope
they would - releasing information about a user to random people is
not a good thing), I would then take legal action to extract that
information from them.

In any case, suing someone for a USENet posting is probably not a good
idea. As anyone moderately familiar with Unix security and netnews can
tell you, it's easy to post netnews from someone else on your host, or
from someone on another host far away (say,
mcvax!kgbvax!kremvax!cherenkov :-). Better yet, you can convince a
host far away to accept netnews posted by a user on a third host.

	<mike
--
It's been a hard day's night,				Mike Meyer
And I been working like a dog.				mwm@berkeley.edu
It's been a hard day's night,				ucbvax!mwm
I should be sleeping like a log.			mwm@ucbjade.BITNET