[130015] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Bonomi)
Sat Sep 25 18:43:30 2010
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 17:41:16 -0500 (CDT)
From: Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> From nanog-bounces+bonomi=mail.r-bonomi.com@nanog.org Sat Sep 25 17:00:42 2010
> Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:01:38 +0200
> From: Jeroen Massar <jeroen@unfix.org>
> To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
> Subject: Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth
> Cc: NANOG <nanog@merit.edu>
>
> On 2010-09-25 23:53, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> > On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:43:25 BST, Matthew Walster said:
> >
> >> Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of
> >> P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of
> >> questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable
> >> for the content cached there?
> >
> > The ISP is off the hook on that one. 17 USC 512(2) specifically carves out an ISP
> > safe-harbor for data that's only cached on an ISP's servers due to an end
> > user's request. IANAL, so have somebody you pay for legal advice read 17 USC 512(2)
> > and tell you what they think.
>
> So it that is true, if you define "news server" as a "cache", even
> though you have to buy several terabytes, make that several petabytes,
> to "be able to "cache" this data one along with all the network
> environment to support getting data out of this "cache", the ISP is
> completely in the clear even though that "cache" is the sole single
> point where one can retrieve that "cached" data from even years after
> the data was originally put on the network, the original is gone and
> that "cache" works without anything being attached to it ? :)
There is existant _recent case law, specifically with regard to operating
a newsserver, that holds otherwise. Of course the server operator was
blatently _advertizing_ the copyright-infringing (and more) nature of
their content.
Several of the major ISPs who recently discontinued providing USENET did
so as a direct result of the above-mentioned case -- attorney-generals
were 'making noises' -- and the ISP chose not to risk a confrontation.
