For everyone who has not already saw this here you go. It really sucks for ALL isp's. Its hard to monitor every single customers content but the judges say we have to =/.


ISP Guilty in Child Porn Case
by Julia Scheeres

3:35 p.m. Feb. 16, 2001 PST

A child pornography case in New York has set a precedent that makes Internet service providers responsible for illegal content on their servers.

BuffNET, a large regional ISP located near Buffalo, pleaded guilty Friday before the State Supreme Court to the misdemeanor charge of knowingly providing access to child pornography. The ISP faces a $5,000 fine when it is sentenced on Feb. 22, the New York Attorney General's office said.

A two-year investigation found that BuffNET had failed to take action after it was notified that one of its newsgroups was distributing child porn. The probe was sparked when customers complained to police that a newsgroup called "Pedo University" was distributing pictures and videos of small children having sex with adults, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said.

Thirteen people were arrested and charged with possession of illegal images. But when the police contacted BuffNET about the newsgroup, the ISP took no action. Consequently, the police seized the ISP's servers.

Spitzer said BuffNET refused to remove the offensive material for financial reasons. He said people subscribed to the service because they knew the ISP allowed access to child porn when other ISPs did not.

This case marks the first time an ISP has been held accountable for allowing access to child pornography.

"This case sets a critical legal precedent," Spitzer said. "It's no different than Blockbuster carrying child pornography.... This is simply not First Amendment-protected material."

Some analysts worry about the effect of the case on Internet free speech.

"What the New York authorities are saying is that ISPs are going to have to choose between being policemen or criminals," said Mike Godwin, a policy fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"They may start shutting down things that they think are illegal," he added. "ISPs are not lawyers, they are communication service providers."

He conceded that a $5,000 fine was peanuts. And he suggested that monetary sanctions in related cases would, in the future, increase to send a clear message to ISPs that they are not immune to prosecution.

"Those who create the market will be held responsible. I reject the notion that cyberspace is beyond the reach of laws," he said, referring to those cyberanarchists who would beg to differ.

BuffNET denied any wrongdoing.

"We broke no laws," said BuffNET attorney Steven S. Fox. "None of the people who were arrested for the posting were BuffNET members."

Fox maintained that the employee who was contacted by police failed to relay the information to the ISP's owners -- otherwise the offensive content would have been removed immediately, he said. He denied that BuffNET profited from child pornography and said it was unfair to single out one ISP for prosecution when "hundreds of ISPs carry these pictures."

The company eventually agreed to plead guilty due to the financial and emotional stress of the case, he said.

Originally posted by jic
For everyone who has not already saw this here you go. It really sucks for ALL isp's. Its hard to monitor every single customers content but the judges say we have to =/.That doesn't seem to be what "the judges say" at all, assuming the facts outlined in the article are accurate. There's nothing about any obligation to monitor what customers are doing, in fact it seems that there's no evidence or claim that any BufNET customers broke the law at all.

Of course, as usual when the press reports on the net, the facts in the article can't all be correct because it cannot be the case that there is a "newsgroup" called "Pedo University." So it's hard to tell, going only by that reading, what exactly the specifics were: was it a newsgroup? was it a website? Without knowing the specifics it's hard to say what actions would have to have been taken to remove access to the alleged illegal material, and so it's hard to judge how reasonable that demand was.

I don't think this case requires any more "monitoring" than you normally do. The case involved an ISP who was informed by customers AND by the police but chose to do nothing about the pictures. I doubt the court would require you to pre-approve every single gif uploaded by a customer.

Wazeh,

That's the slant I get on it too. In essence they were convicted of *knowingly* hosting kiddie porn. If they were totally unaware of it then they might have a case against it. In short it made them no better than anyone else who profits from that stuff, and they got caught for it.

If you run a reputable business and listen to your feedback then you should have nothing to fear - especially when it's the police providing that feedback. :)

Greg Moore

akashik & Wazeh

Spot on!

The Digital Millineum Copyright Act of 1998 explicitly renders an online service provider immune to legal action for illegal files they unknowingly host. Once they are notified however, they become liable.

Now when it comes to customers and police, they all have to prove they notified the isp. Most likely, someone recieved an acknowlegement letter back, and it was probably the police if anyone who recieved it. I am willing to bet that if you send to abuse@buffnet, you will get an autoresponder. That autoresponder is probably what was handed to the judge as proof of notification...

This is a good reason for NOT using autoresponders. I dont want to be sued because I happen to miss an email, and have an autoresponder as proof I recieved it....you?

Here in the Netherlands, the government requires the ISP's to buy one or several "monitoring" servers costing $400,000 each.

At least, that's what they are planning to do...

With autoresponders, I've noticed 2 types out there. Ones that only reply and ones that when replying also forward the email to the default box. I'd love to know how to get mine to do the latter.

Concerning Buttnet....Several years ago I had a series of run ins with them. Arogent beyond belief. Their sys-admin at the time really needed a copy of some Dale Carnegie books. They are one of those companies that seemed above all else. Were one of the largest in WNY, might still be but I believe their past is catching up to them.

As far as their guilt, I'm sorry, but if you have a news feed that carries alt.binaries.pedo or alt.binaries.sex.children or whatever, get a clue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can filter out groups in the newsfeed software. Yes, 70,000 discussion areas is a bit much to filter, BUT ya only gotta do it once, then check it every week or month when you snag the new groups and S-can the "questionable" ones. Theres a way to do this with a minimum of labor, and pain.

Originally posted by Kaith Sutai-Rustaz
As far as their guilt, I'm sorry, but if you have a news feed that carries alt.binaries.pedo or alt.binaries.sex.children or whatever, get a clue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can filter out groups in the newsfeed softwareOf course that's absolutely true. Most newsadmins would also agree that it's pointless at best, stupid probably, to blindly accept every alt.* newgroup request.

It's not uncommon these days for ptotentially objectionable subject matter to be posted in an otherwise low-traffic stealth alt.* group. A lot of binary traffic comes in such groups, outside of the alt.binaries.* namespace, in order to get around the common practice of expiring binary groups more quickly than other groups.

As I said earlier, the facts as reported in the quoted article are too sketchy to really judge exactly what was going on. But while it's conceivable that for some time an ISP might not be aware that a particular group is carrying such materials, it seems from the scant evidence presented here that in this case someone at BuffNet knew exactly what they were doing. As reported in that article, the management isn't denying that the company received notice from the police and it would seem that if that notice were only recieved by an autoresponer as presented as one possible scenario that'd be the defense (or excuse) they'd present. Instead they say that someone at the company received it, but didn't inform the management.

My company carries newsgroup traffic. This ruling doesn't worry me at all; I'm confident we wouldn't do what they did, either intentionally or through error.

Kaith,

Exactly :)

James R. Clark II
Nethosters Inc.
http://www.nethosters.com

Somebody mentioned the DMCA; that law applies only to copyright infringement. But you were on the right track. The ironically-titled Communications Decency Act (CDA) should absolve ISPs of responsibility for postings on interactive forums (unless the ISPs did the posting, of course). Like every Internet law issue, however, the law is unsettled. The strong trend, though, has been for courts to construe the statute as providing broad protection for ISPs.

What happened in this case is that NY's AG wanted to nail these folks, and persuaded them to cop a plea. The ISP claimed that it had already spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and just didn't think it was worth fighting anymore.

In any event, a guilty plea creates no legal precedent at all. That said, it may encourage other prosecutors to push the envelope. . . .

Best regards,

-- Jon

[The foregoing does not constitute legal advice, if you need legal advice you should retain a lawyer, and no attorney-client relationship has formed. But you knew that, right?]

The CDA is DOA and RIP. It was shot down in court and no longer applies, unless I missed some later news about it.

What happened is that a very small piece of the CDA (the part that was not about enforcing "decency") survived judicial review. Sorry for the confusion.

-- JB