At 11:49 AM -0600 4/25/01, kreme imposed structure on a stream of
electrons, yielding:
>At 12:26 4/23/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>>Hello -
>>
>>> Without wishing to start an argument or get into a "legal "advice"
>>> discussion, I think an ISP who does not scan or does not offer a scanning
>>> service to its customers is taking a legal risk and has the potential for a
>>> claim for "negligence" even if it is only "contributory negligence."
>>
>>As far as I know, SIMS does not block viruses. Any plans?
>
>I completely and totally disagree with the original statement.
>Anyone who takes reasoanble precautions (which include not using
>MSFT products on windows platforms to read email) will have no
>problems with Viruses.
>
>I've NEVER had a virus. (well, at least not one I didn't
>intentionally run) and I've NEVER run virus protection software, and
>I download 100,000 emails a year and probably on the order of 10-20
>GB a month of data.
>
>Just because someone is too lazy to be smart about their files and
>downloads and emails doesn't mean that it's someone else's fault.
Yup.
>In fact, if an ISP starts scanning email for viruses, an argument
>could be made that they are then responsible for the legality of ALL
>the email passing through their servers. This might be fine for a
>business that has control over their employees, but it certainly is
>not OK for an ISP.
While I'm no lawyer, I believe that this is true. There have been
multiple legal cases where an ISP has been judged on their liability
for the nature of content based on their promises and actions
regarding filtering. The general rule is that if an ISP attempts to
filter content definitively or promises that they will do so then
they effectively become publishers of anything that survives their
attempts to filter, and liable for it. Typically ISP's service
contracts have big disclaimers of responsibility for any content
which are agreed to by the user when signing up for service. It seems
unlikely to me that an ISP which does not attempt to do the
fundamentally flawed trick of virus filtering and warns users when
they sign up to not hold the ISP responsible for what data they get
from the net is safe from being blamed for passing data that the user
doesn't like.
>
>This is similar to what happened a few years ago with newsfeeds.
>The courts position was the same, "All or none." Either the ISP
>filters newsfeeds and becomes responsible for ALL posts on ALL
>groups or they don't filter any news and are not responsible for any
>posts on any groups.
cite please. I try to keep up on such things (especially as regards
news) and know of no case that had that clear a distinction made.
--
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Geek seeks work! For details see: http://scconsult.com/bill/resume.html
#############################################################
This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to
the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
