🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <EvMM2B.Izp.0.sheppard@torfree.net>,
Jim Butterfield <fjb@torfree.net> wrote:
|Randy Wittchen (wittchen@direct.ca) wrote:
|
|:                                         ...    Industry Canada has
|: produced a report which looks at potential criminal and civil liability
|: for persons posting to Usenet and website content as well as potential
|: liability for ISP's.  This should be required reading for any officer or
|: director of an ISP.
|
|Thanks, Randy.  Your comments are useful.  I believe I've already made 
|reference to the Industry Canada document.
|
|The directors of the TFN would be well advised to read it, if they have 
|not done so already.  If they find they disagree with it, they should 
|seek legal advice, since the document was prepared by persons with 
|substantial legal expertise.
|
|I'm not a director, just a TFN member.  But I sincerely hope that the 
|directors, and the TFN, do not run into serious difficulty by adopting 
|the belief that "inaction will keep us safe".  This past week, "Jane Doe" 
|collected $220,000 from the Toronto Police because they did not take 
|action to warn her of a rapist who was active in the region.  Not the 
|same thing, of course, but it does point out that inaction will not get 
|you off the hook.


	More irrelevant sensationalism.  Your example
	has *nothing* to do with what we are discussing.


	Let's look at 2 parts of the Industry Canada
	document for a second.  The first is the intro
	to the whole thing:


Internet Content-Related Liability Study

The views expressed in this Study are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect government policy.


	The second is the conclusion to the Liability
	section:


However, in the present state of the law, it remains difficult to
distinguish the circumstances in which an access provider should
act to prevent prejudice from those situations which do not present
a sufficiently clear case to justify an intervention which often
could result in severe censorship. Without having access to the
viewpoints of all those involved, it is indeed very difficult to
determine whether a specific content is actionable. The access
provider thus finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being
criticized at some point for having permitted a content harming a
person to circulate, when it is really very poorly placed to
intervene in order to suppress a content of which the harmful
nature is often far from obvious. Moreover, the principle of
freedom of expression as it is understood in democratic societies
concords poorly with practices in which access providers would
pass judgment on the potentially actionable or harmful nature
of information passing through their facilities. 


-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker		Toronto, Ontario	1 416 699 1868
a /i/	 Internet: bdb@gts.org	Uucp: ...!gts!bdb
 `\o\-e	 "...and then we had to reformat the Ontario government
 _< /_	 		'cos it had a boot-camp virus"		- Gully Foyle



-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker		Toronto, Ontario	1 416 699 1868
a /i/	 Internet: bdb@gts.org	Uucp: ...!gts!bdb
 `\o\-e	 "...and then we had to reformat the Ontario government
 _< /_	 		'cos it had a boot-camp virus"		- Gully Foyle