lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (02/05/85)
For those of you only reading net.followup, please check over the last week or so of net.news and net.news.stargate and you'll find my comments on the liability issues. Regarding the lawyer's presentation at Usenix: VERY BRIEF: 1) The Usenix board considers the view to be a worse case scenario. But that's what lawyers are for. 2) The board does not feel that there is anything necessarily bad about liabilities, so long as they understand what they are in advance. Every newspaper, magazine, TV station, and even Usenix when it publishes ";login" takes responsibility for what they are distributing. It's the price that's paid for putting out something of value. 3) The same lawyer told me that it would not be legally safe in any case to pump current Usenet groups through the satellite without moderation. If there was going to be no control based on content, she suggested that secure authentication of each user would be required, and possibly signed statements from each accepting full responsibility for their postings to a central computer. In other words, you can't just set up an open, anonymous pipeline that freely allows libel, obscenity, and copyright violations and expect to escape responsiblity. You cannot simply "pass along" the responsibility indefinitely and hope it will vanish. This from the same person who made the talk at Usenix. If there was to be no control based on content, and since resource allocation would be required in any case (the satellite bandwidth is not unlimited) she suggested that possibly people would have to be charged for everything they submit, or that everyone would have to be allocated a fixed amount of space (5K/day? 5K/week?) to fit into the allocation. In my view, both of the above are unfair and would be much more harmful to the level of info on the net than a carefully designed moderation system (which would also have the benefit of reducing the "noise" level to the point that more people could take the time to actually read netnews again.) I don't think people should be allowed to post infinite crap just because they have money, nor that everyone should be given equal slots of time. The information quality DOES vary between people, and money isn't the deciding factor! Like I said, the Usenix board does not consider liability, in and of itself, to be anything more than a normal part of doing business. What will come out of all this is still far from decided, that's for sure. More on this is in net.news and net.news.stargate. --Lauren--