Scott Dorsey wrote:
Chuck Harris wrote:
As I understand things, it is a "common carrier" sort of thing. If you make
no effort to filter or censor a feed, then you are not responsible for its
content. If RCN were to make an effort to filter out junk like the MI5 stuff,
and other nasties, and they missed some, then they would be open to being sued
for what they missed. It is like the protection the telephone company has
against being sued because of folks that use the telephone to perform illegal
activities.

That's stupid. Dump RCN and get an account with a competently run news
server. Anybody who would hide behind that sort of reasoning has no business
connecting their machine to Usenet.

I am not aware of RCN having made any statements on the subject. I am simply
telling you my understanding of the legal issue.

ISPs have NO common carrier protection of any sort...

Oh but they do! Otherwise they would be liable for all of the nasty
stuff goes over their feed. Things such as illegal downloads of copyrighted
material, software piracy, kiddie porn...

and if a good faith
effort at maintaining their feed isn't sufficient, that is no excuse not
to make such an effort...

Personally, I would prefer that they didn't attempt to be a censor of what
comes over my feed. There tastes might differ from my own. I would prefer
to control the filters.

-Chuck

Chuck Harris wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

ISPs have NO common carrier protection of any sort...

Oh but they do! Otherwise they would be liable for all of the nasty
stuff goes over their feed. Things such as illegal downloads of copyrighted
material, software piracy, kiddie porn...

If the FCC has not given it the status of a common carrier, and it is
not regulated by a public utility commission, it is not a common carrier
under US law. European law may be different.

The degree to which an ISP is legally liable for the traffic they transmit
is still under discussion. Look at the Communications Decency Act, for
example, which makes the ISP liable for a lot of things which they legally
could not be if they had been declared common carriers.

Personally, I would prefer that they didn't attempt to be a censor of what
comes over my feed. There tastes might differ from my own. I would prefer
to control the filters.

But they have to be. Even setting retention and expiration times and
deciding which of the millions of newsgroups to carry and whether to
accept different kinds of control messages is in some way attempting to
"censor what comes over your feed." Your news admin has limited resources;
he can apply them toward getting more binaries groups, or he can apply them
toward extending retention times of existing groups. He can set things up
so that higher traffic groups expire faster. It is what news admins do.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."