🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1917@thanatos.win-uk.net>,
osiris@thanatos.win-uk.net (Paul Burridge) wrote:

>In article <ant1517490b0XL#k@pharpech.demon.co.uk>, Dave Roberts
>(Dave@pharpech.demon.co.uk) writes:
>
>>This guy is a Dr and I believe worked at a
>>uni. If so, he even had the option of asking in the uni computing
>>department what he might do about it, especially the newsmaster there...
>
>Not being a computer nerd, I would simply assume that nothing
>*could* be done about it.

Although I believe that in law the Doc has a good case, and although I
believe that in general, after this case, ISPs are going to have to grasp
the business of making people more aware of their ability to cancel in
certain circumstances, and to grasp the business of their own
responsibility for libel once it has been brought to their attention, I do
think it ludicrous to assume that the Doc didn't know about cancelling.
He's been around a long time and is a veteran of Usenet libel- just about
the only one in Britain in fact. *If* he claims ignorance (and I have no
idea if that is his position), I don't see anybody wearing it.

And *if* the forged message used his address to the extent that he could
have cancelled it (and from reading this thread I'm still not clear about
that) I don't suppose that any court would award him more than a couple of
quid in damages- which makes his pursuit of Demon very risky for him. If
the address was formed in such a way that he couldn't have cancelled it
simply (for instance my newsreader will only allow me to do simple cancels
if the article was injected from my Demon address) then I suspect that
Demon's defence in that respect becomes much dodgier, although he could
still have cancelled using a manually formed cancel.

However I don't know if that *is* Demon's alternative defence. 

Whatever the realities of that situation, the one thing the Doc is *not* is
a computer or Usenet innocent.

-- 
Peter