1996-03-11 - Re: Not a good idea…

Header Data

From: “E. ALLEN SMITH” <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
To: tcmay@got.net
Message Hash: 588d5db388047b94a9c7200e3b010480774d0e892b43a828e8eea04d05e29104
Message ID: <01I26T3JWQ7AAKTUL8@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1996-03-11 04:11:44 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 12:11:44 +0800

Raw message

From: "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 12:11:44 +0800
To: tcmay@got.net
Subject: Re: Not a good idea...
Message-ID: <01I26T3JWQ7AAKTUL8@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)

>We need to be very careful here. A service like "SurfWatch," voluntarily
>used by others, has entered into no contracts with sites to meet defined
>standards of what should and shouldn't be blocked. It is essentially a
>"review" service, like a reviewer of books, movies, restaurants, etc. Sure,
>some books, movies, and restaurants are "hurt" by negative reviews, but
>this is life in a free society. It has not yet reached the point in these
>Beknighted States that a bad review can be the basis of a tort (though I
>could be wrong...nothing would surprise me these days).

	One wonders if an ISP (say, Prodigy or AOL) that used SurfWatch to
automatically filter everything could be liable if they filtered something
that wasn't against their policies (due to overly accepting SurfWatch's or
TimWatch's ratings) - non-provision of service? I'd guess they have some
clause or another in their normal contract w/users to try to prevent such, but
framing it so as to cover such without also basically making it a non-contract
(no agreement to provide anything) could be difficult.
	-Allen





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