🚀 go-pugleaf

wbe@bbn.com (Winston Edmond) writes:

[...]
>  Of
>course, if you believe the law is wrong, you could choose to engage in civil
>disobedience and carry the illegal material anyway, but then you should
>expect to be arrested and taken to court some day.

Copyright violation and libel in the U.S. are civil wrongs, so
you wouldn't be subject to arrest.

[...]
>   As a practical matter, you can estimate the risk of carrying a group by
>determining what percentage of the stuff in the group is clearly illegal
>(copies without permission of copyrighted material in this case).
[...]

This might be a good measure for copyright and libel, but not for
obscenity. In the U.S., material is obscene only if 3) when taken as a
whole, it "must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or
scientific value".

I don't know the case law on what constitutes a "whole" material, but
I would think that the impracticality of checking each article
individually would support the idea that a newsgroup should be judged
as a whole.

- Carl

ANNOTATED REFERENCES

(All these documents are available on-line. Access information follows.)

=================
law/miller
=================
The Supreme Court's definition of obscenity (the so-called _Miller_
test)

=================
=================

These document(s) are available by anonymous ftp (the preferred
method) and by email. To get the file(s) via ftp, do an anonymous ftp
to ftp.eff.org (192.88.144.4), and get file(s):

  pub/academic/law/miller

To get the file(s) by email, send email to archive-server@eff.org.
Include the line(s) (be sure to include the space before the file
name):

send acad-freedom/law miller
--
Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign