🚀 go-pugleaf

[A followup to an article in news.admin.policy, in a thread about
restricting newsgroups with a lot of probably illegal material in
them.]

In article <1992Aug13.160445.16878@dragon.acadiau.ca> 880518l@dragon.acadiau.ca (Nelson Langille) writes:

   Yes, but isin't it true that many(mostly all) anonymous FTP sites
   contain pictures which are copyrighted?  So what's the difference.

Unless you mean, "many anonymous FTP sites which contain pictures
contain pictures which are copyrighted," your statement is false,
since most anonymous ftp sites don't carry any pictures at all -- they
don't have the space and don't think it's important enough (and don't
want to worry about the copyright problems).

As for your latter question, "So what's the difference?"  If anything,
administrators of ftp sites with copyrighted materials on them are
MORE likely to get into trouble if anybody decides to start enforcing
their subjects, since anonymous ftp site administrators have in many
cases actively made files available on their systems, rather than just
allowing copyrighted articles to pass through as part of the stream of
mostly legal material that is the Usenet.

If you are someone who thinks that newsgroups with much illegal
material in them should not be received by your site, then you
probably also believe that your site should not have an anonymous ftp
archive with illegal material in it.  If, on the other hand, you
believe that the newsgroup is OK because you think that Usenet sites
have common carrier status, then you may or may not believe the same
thing about anonymous ftp archives.

Of course, the existence of anonymous ftp archives that allow anyone
to put files in them for downloading without interacting with the
administrator clouds the issue somewhat.

Further discussion of anonymous ftp archives should probably go
somewhere other than news.admin.policy, since it has nothing to do
with news.  I have cross-posted and redirected followups to
comp.admin.policy.

-- 
Jonathan Kamens                                         jik@MIT.Edu
MIT Information Systems/Athena              Moderator, news.answers
    (Send correspondence related to the news.answers newsgroup
        {and ONLY correspondence related to the newsgroup}
                 to news-answers-request@MIT.Edu.)