[480] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
ANS Acceptable Use Policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Fri Mar 29 06:53:44 1991
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 91 20:08:46 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: emv@ox.com
Cc: kwe@bu-it.bu.edu, com-priv@psi.com, maloff@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Edward Vielmetti's message of Thu, 28 Mar 91 18:15:24 EST <m0jM6Bg-0003jHC@crane.aa.ox.com>
>> 4. ANS networks must not be used to transmit any
>> communication where the meaning of the message, or its
>> transmission or distribution, would violate any
>> applicable law or regulation or would likely be highly
>> offensive to the recipient or recipients thereof.
>
>I find this regulation somewhat disturbing, esp. the question of
>what is "highly offensive". How (pray tell) am I supposed to know
>when my electronic speech is offensive, especially in the circumstances
>where the target audience of that speech (e.g. this mailing list) is
>very diffuse? For all I know this very message could be construed
>as highly offensive to the people at ANS...
Although I don't know the details of the laws involved with such
things I would highly recommend considering a policy to cover this
which reads more like "We will cooperate with law-enforcement
agencies..." rather than purporting to be one. That is, just state the
obvious and almost tautological (as if you could say "we WON'T
cooperate with law-enforcement agencies", har.)
In general you at least want the threshold of having the target of
such "offensive speech" go complain to the police etc, similar to the
TelCos, and then you simply agree to (and warn that you will)
cooperate as required of you by law.
Otherwise you're just inviting the role of being a big "in loci
parenti" baby-sitter settling flame-wars and so forth. This sounds to
me like a campus computing center mentality the way it's worded (can't
imagine how that happened...)
Obviously in practice one can try to play ombudsman in such disputes
if you really like that role, but I wouldn't offer it in my official
policies. Sounds to me like you're thereby implicitly offering some
sort of protection and even satisfaction! Isn't there a warranty in
there somewhere?
And I wouldn't be shocked if a court agreed if it came to a lawsuit
and was searching around for deep-pockets (remember the "common-law"
dictum, if no one is found at fault then restitution is left to the
party most able to pay...sounds like this invites becoming a party by
failing to enforce the above adequately or appearing to have promised
some sort of protection from "offensive speech".)
Study the telcos, they're pros at this stuff and have been debugging
it for almost 100 years. They'll change your number and all that but
in the end all they'll *promise* is to cooperate with legal
investigations.
-Barry Shein
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