Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 17:45:14 -0600 (CST) From: "Kenneth P. Stox" <ken@stox.sa.enteract.com> To: Phillip Salzman <psalzman@gamefish.pcola.gulf.net> Cc: Casper <casper@acc.am>, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BESS internet filtering Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812261730390.5916-100000@m4.stox.sa.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812261539420.5027-100000@gamefish.pcola.gulf.net>
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On Sat, 26 Dec 1998, Phillip Salzman wrote: [SNIP] > I was mostly interested if someone knows about the legal status > of doing something like this. Will we lose our carrier status > as an ISP, and become provider of internet content? Have you > ever heard of someone being sued due to finding pornography > when it was supposed to be filtered (even though we will say > "This does not entirely remove..."), etc. Another issue, on which I have seen little discussion, is the inverse case. What are the liabilities for filtering a site which has no pornographic content ? I recently had the chance to experience this first hand. One of the experiments, where I work, is known as Dzero. They have a rather sizable web site which they use to publish scientific data, dissertations, and other documents ( Some 400,000 pages at last count ). A decision was made to reorganize the site, and the newly re-organized site was put under a URL which contained the string "newdzero" or something close to that. Suddenly we were barraged by complaints that these pages were not accessible. Turns out that a number of filtering services were blocking the site, or portions of the site, since it contained the string "newdz" which is claimed to be hacker-speak for "nudes." Fortunately, this is a group of very understanding physicists, and no litigation was threatened. A few kind emails cleared up the situation quickly, along with some changes in URL's. In a slightly different case, had this been a commercial site, I could see all sorts of litigation, from liable to civil rights violations. Just some food for thought. -Ken Stox stox@enteract.com stox@fnal.gov To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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