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From: leonard@qiclab.pdx.com (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin,misc.legal
Subject: Re: childish and insulting behavior
Message-ID: <831@qiclab.pdx.com>
Date: Tue, 6-Oct-87 20:05:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: qiclab.831
Posted: Tue Oct  6 20:05:53 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 12:24:48 EDT
References: <3072@mtgzz.UUCP> <558@cc6.bbn.com.BBN.COM> <2945@phri.UUCP> <21110@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <2649@xanth.UUCP>
Reply-To: leonard@qiclab.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Organization: Qic Laboratories, Portland, Oregon.
Lines: 30
Xref: mnetor news.groups:1658 news.admin:1127 misc.legal:3026

In article <2649@xanth.UUCP> kyle@xanth.UUCP (Kyle Jones) writes:
<In article <21110@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, James Wilbur Lewis writes:
<> I don't relish the prospect of having all my outgoing mail screened by
<> my U.C. Berkeley officials in an effort to avoid legal difficulties...
<
<And U.C. Berkeley wouldn't relish it either.  It would be more
<expedient for them to just axe netnews access.  And that would most
<emphatically be that.

As far as I know (and I freely admit that I'm not an expert) the only precedents
are those from the case(s) involving credit card info and the like being posted
on bulletin board systems. If these _are_ the only precedents, then the owner of
a system is _totally_ responsible for anything posted on it, even if he didn't
know it was there!

By extension, I'd guess that mail & netnews would be the resonsibility of the
originating site (though I wouldn't put it past the legal system to decide that
_all_ sites that carried the offending material were liable).

We have _got_ to get some precedents, or better yet, some intellgent laws on the
subject. But I'm afraid that if the orinigator cannot be identified, then the
sysadmin is the one whose neck will be on the line... (and likewise if the
originating site can't be identified, the last site oin the chain will be 'it')


-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]		...!tektronix!reed!qiclab!leonard
"I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'.
You know... I'd rather be a hacker."