© 1997 j-dom Media. Contact us!
The latest legal challenge to an Internet Service Provider has actually made the news offline as well as online. CompuServe was recently asked by German authorities to prevent access to over 200 newsgroups. Due to the make-up of their system their customers world-wide were banned and not only in Germany. These groups were supposed to carry sexual, paedophilic and neo-Nazi information that was illegal in Germany. Naturally the contents of these groups were moved to unrelated groups by freedom activists, thereby nullifying the effects of the censorious authorities.
The latest chapter in this saga has just been written, though. Felix Somm of the CompuServe German branch has just been charged after a long police investigation that included a raid on their offices. Mr.Somm has been prosecuted due to German laws preventing criminal proceedings against companies. The charges include paedophile and neo-Nazi offences due to illegal information in the form of pictures and text being supplied through the CompuServe network from the Internet.
In the UK Scotland Yard has put pressure on service providers to ban access to sites from a list compiled by the police or face the possibility of prosecution under existing laws. Smaller providers who can't afford legal fees have complied and also have formed the Internet Watch Foundation which runs a hotline for people to report objectionable sites. Demon Internet, the largest service provider in the UK has flatly refused. By accepting to ban access to sites they would be implying that they are responsible for the information they carry. Also they realise that the Internet works around such barriers and people would provide alternative access to the banned information on a matter of principle.
Those are the facts, now lets see the arguments in Part 2
