Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:47:58 -0400 (EDT) From: "Graydon Hoare ()" <admin@multinet.net> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: News... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970417112955.11608B-100000@house.multinet.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.93.970417065419.26558h-100000@sidhe.memra.com>
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On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Michael Dillon wrote: the reason there is a scare over these things is that some ISPs and (in particular) university campus admins 'silently dropped' services which they had objections to, by other people. Like the anti-porn-group tells the admin to drop the porn-group.. then it gets political, and usually some admin who just wanted everyone to shut up and go away gets caught with the responsibility of having 'made the decision' (i.e. being the only person who knows how to change the config files) I do not believe there is actually any legal leg to stand on when attempting to sue an ISP for editing content, so long as the subscriber knows it's a possible turn of events when they sign on. It would be like trying to sue the phone company for having different rate schemes to keep international traffic rates down. you're not violating anyone's first amendment rights or anything, and if they don't like your policy they can always find some _other_ news server.. Just make it clear when establishing your contract with them that you are not agreeing to give them every last byte ever posted to usenet (which isn't possible anyway) and you are acting totally within your contractual agreement to. Public libraries don't agree to carry porn, why should your news server? > > IMHO the solution is to clean up binaries from USENET and force people to > use file transfer protocols (FTP, HTTP, DCC, FSP) to transfer files. > even though there isn't really a difference between a message and a file, you're probably right from a legal standpoint.. particularly in light of the enhanced multicast capabilities a lot of equipment is proposing for the next revisions, the whole traffic scheme will continue to shift. hopefully away from netnews ;) who knows? maybe usenet will someday calm down and become useful again. -graydon <admin@multinet.net>
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