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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: AGIS Signing up New Spammers
On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Karl Denninger wrote: > Heh, a few legitimate customers might have been inconvenienced, but when > [email protected][owner-of-network] bounces with a "access denied", that's all you have > left. > > -- > -- > Karl Denninger ([email protected])| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin I'd like to ask an operations question that deals with SPAM that hopefully will be on topic. Here goes: If you decide to start filtering out SPAM by blocking it from the source, do you end up becoming a content provider because you're controlling what your customers have access to? If that is the case, what legal implications arise from allowing certain news groups on your server that contain material that is illegal (the alt.binaries.warez.* and some of the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* groups come to mind)? Are we now responsible for those groups, and everything else that comes into your network because you've taken the effort to start controlling what your customers can see and do? A lot of us have gotten by on the premise that we are not content providers, but service providers who can't control what our customers see or do, and that there is illegal material out there that we are not liable for. I think that once we start making decisions about what content we allow, then we are setting ourselves up to be liable for what gets through. Just think, responsibility for porn, warez, hatespeech, harassment, etc. Could this actually be used in a court of law? Although this is on the fringe of Network Operations as a whole, I think it is a valid issue to be discussed on a Network Operators list because blocking SPAM/UCE is an operational decision which might carry some interesting legal dilemas with it. Joe Shaw - [email protected] NetAdmin - Insync Internet Services
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