THIS SECTION WAS NOT CREATED BY A LAWYER, AND THEREFORE DOES NOT CONTAIN LEGAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CHECK WITH YOUR LAWYER BEFORE PROCEEDING. INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS SECTION IS BASED ON MY REASONABLE KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF BUT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE COMPLETE.
That said, here are some of the legal issues currently facing providers:
COPYRIGHT: Many newsgroups contain blatant violations of copyright law. The most prominent among these are the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica* groups, which often include scans from Playboy magazine and other copyrighted material. Karl Denninger (Karl@MCS.COM) avoids potential liability by not carrying these groups at all, and strongly urges other providers to do the same. Others note that there are frequent equally blatant copyright violations on a large percentage of groups, including the full text of newspaper and magazine articles often typed into news.admin.misc. A CRL user proposed to create a test case of this by bragging about his post of a specific copyright violation to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, including his PGP signature for verification. As far as I know, no action has been taken against him for this. Certainly, there has been no recorded incident of any action taken against Internet providers or their users for copyright violations against Playboy or anyone else. Playboy did win a case against a bulletin board operator who scanned in images from Playboy and sold them via subscription.
SLANDER, LIBEL ET AL: Someone more knowledgeable than I will have to write this section.
THE COMMON CARRIER ISSUE: This one likewise.
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