I Have No AOL and I Must Scream
By John DeNardo |
Thursday, February 12th, 2004 at
12:43 pm
On the seas of digital piracy, Harlan Ellison is making a splash in response to his own works being offered freely over the Internet. Now, a recent ruling has been granted in his favor.
Filed under: Books
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Just my off the cuff thoughts. I think AOL should be given the safe harbor exemption. To me, just because AOL allows access to Usenet does not mean they should be liable for anything that get placed on the newsgroups. Even if the person putting the material on the groups was a subscriber to AOL. I look at ISPs as akin to telephone companies. The Bells aren’t liable if someone uses the phone to commit a scam, or to send music over the line so someone else can record it, however crappy the recording might be.
If I were on that jury, and barring any other additional facts, I wouldn’t find AOL liable. If they are, then they will have no choice but to shut down access and may have to vigorously watchdog all content that passed out, and in to their system. This will lead to a stultifying of AOL in particular and the Internet in general.
In my opinion, you have to accept that some infringement will occur, and that the guilty parties are only those involved in actual act. Otherwise you’ll have a very boring and vanilla medium.
Just my off the cuff thoughts. I would agree with JP on this if it were any other ISP. But since this is the mass mailing, mass spamming, massively annoying, A-Hole-Hell, it just might be fun to see them get in trouble for some crap.
The case has been settled. Who won? Good question.