Legal Liability For ISPs Revisited

from the not-over-yet dept

Last month we wrote about the ISP in Pennsylvania who had their servers seized for providing a Usenet tool that some people were using to access child porn. Now, the law is pretty clear ISP liability on such things. The liability falls with those who actually possess the child porn, and not the ISP used to access it. This is for a few very good reasons - including the fact that passing liability on to the ISPs would basically require them to first analyze every packet that went across their network. This, obviously isn't practical. Now, the Associated Press has picked up on the story and are running their own article with more details about the potential legal ramifications of the case. Unfortunately, because it's focused on the third rail issue of "child pornography" many people are going to miss the legal importance of what's happening and focus on why it's important to stop child porn. That's absolutely true, but the way to do that is to go after those actually responsible for the child porn and not the ISP that people used to access it. This is yet another case where people are going after enabling technology that has plenty of legitimate uses, rather than going after those who actually broke the law.

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