(I promise I won't post to the list on this tangent after this one,
but I think the following needs saying on the list. If you'd like to
chat further about these things, news.admin.misc might make a good
place, or mail me)
At 4:14 PM -0600 4/27/01, kreme imposed structure on a stream of
electrons, yielding:
>At 15:23 4/26/2001 -0400, you wrote:
[...]
>>All of the largest news providers do SOME sort of filtering on the
>>feeds into their reader systems.
>
>Like what, exactly?
Most commonly, dropping articles not posted to at least one group in
the local active file. That's almost universal. Many sites drop
articles cross-posted too widely, with some sites refining that by
allowing posts that have follow-ups set to fewer groups. Many sites
have poison group names, so that an article crossposted to foo.bar
and poison.group.name will be dropped even if foo.bar is carried
locally, because poison.group.name has been marked locally as a group
to never carry posts in. The examples could be listed forever,
because the tricks differ at every site. If you really want to see
what's common, you should research "Cleanfeed," a perl package
written by Jeremy Nixon of Supernews. It's a very commonly used tool,
and has a variety of filtering gadgetry.
>I mean, I suspect (but only _suspect_) that uswest/qwest
>intentionally drops parts of muli-part binaries, but I don't have
>any way of proving it without spending far more time than I care to.
More likely in that case they are just incompetent. It IS Qwest after
all, the geniuses who decided last year to totally stop responding to
abuse complaints at all. Making sure you get every last post in
binary groups is an art for a news admin that requires redundant
feeds to cluefully-run sites, and Qwest has managed to offend nearly
every major network operator with any clues. It wouldn't shock me if
they just can't manage to GET all the posts in the first place. I'd
bet a lot of admins at the better-run sites (like Supernews) probably
don't want to have anything to do with someplace that /dev/null's
abuse reports.
>>Frankly, I think statements like the one I was responding to are
>>irresponsible. Even if one assumes that the Cubby and Stratton
>>Oakmont cases would be applied as precedent to news (dubious) they
>>don't support such a sharp line for what a news provider can do
>>safely.
>
>I used to be involved with a public access unix server that looked
>very carefully into the newsfeed issue. This was about the same
>time as the Compuserve case, and there was another case about that
>time which I cannot find (perhaps it was settled?). As well as
>another incident (though I don't believe the courts were involved)
>which involved someone who was offended by the group
>alt.soc.culture.muslim.moss (or something like that), a newsgroup
>for homosexual muslims, and wanted the group removed. Heck, it
>might not have even been an alt. group.
>
>The advice we relied on came from legal counsel, but not being a
>lawyer I don't have (or know) the cases she was relying on. (AT&T
>pre-breakup comes to mind?)
>
>What we were told is that if we did not filter the newsfeed we could
>not be considered a "publisher" but instead a "common carrier."
Absolute bullshit. ISP's are never common carriers in their ISP
functions. This is why companies with common carrier operations (like
Qwest) have arms-length (in theory) subdivisions between their ISP
operations and their regulated ones. Common carriers are in classes
defined by statute and regulation which simply doesn't cover ISP's
and the FCC has repeatedly ruled that ISP's should not be lumped in
with long distance carriers precisely because it would subject them
to the burdens of common carrier regulations. I wouldn't trust that
lawyer for any advice.
I've been administering news servers for 8 years and have also dealt
with lawyers on such issues. I've seen the legal argument your lawyer
made before, but not by anyone I would pay a dime to for legal
advice: it is a repeated 2nd-stage whine of the folks who start with
"you're a censor and violating my rights because you don't carry
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.obscure.fetish.group.that.only.has.spam.anyway."
I have 3 times had such wastes of air get their whining to the right
PHB and trigger the expenditure of hundreds of dollars on making a
lawyer giggle. If I seem a bit testy on this, blame the fact that
I've probably wasted 100 hours of my life over this baseless argument
in the last decade and it has been shot down untold thousands of
times in ever professional forum where news admins gather, and yet it
keeps coming back. At least if it were a vampire we could drive a
stake through it and stuff it's mouth with garlic...
In addition, nearly every news provider exercises *exactly* the sort
of control you describe, and there has never been a case in the US
finding an ISP to be a primary publisher OR a 'common carrier' in
regards to news. In my dozen years reading news, I cannot count the
number of times I've seen people who like to play net-lawyer rant
about how news providers can only be 'common carriers' or
'publishers' and make that choice by whether they filter news. In
fact that's not even the distinction, according to any lawyer whose
actual opinion on this I've seen myself (as opposed to heard of
2nd-hand.) Lofty Becker did a fine write-up on these issues in fall
1989 Conn. Law Review, which is remarkably consistent with the later
Compuserve and Prodigy cases previously cited and even to some extent
with the Demon case, given the UK/US differences. There are *3*
things an ISP could be relative to discussion fora: a primary
publisher, secondary publisher, or non-publisher. Prodigy managed to
be found a primary publisher because they manually vetted every
posting. CIS managed to escape that because they convinced the judge
that despite their ex post facto editorial activities in the forum in
question they were merely a 'distributor' akin to a bookstore, i.e. a
secondary publisher. Demon lost their case because they didn't do
what a proper British secondary publisher is supposed to do when told
that they are carrying defamatory material.
--
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Geek seeks work! For details see: http://scconsult.com/bill/resume.html
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