sporkme
drop the crantini and move it, sister
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join:2000-07-01
Morristown, NJ
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| reply to robbin
Re: Block P2P or be Sued
said by someone:
While no ISP's have been sued Yet, There have been rumblings that we could be sued for not blocking traffic we know to be illegal in nature. Who knows WHAT the RIAA will do next? said by robbin  :So my question is how many block certain ports from their clients specifically because someone on their network "may" be doing something illegal? Is there any reason to believe that as a WISP we should censor our clients in their usage of the internet? The legal aspects are not at all WISP-specific, so allow me to blather. 
Once upon a time there was this thing called Usenet where people got all their warez, porn, and likely illegal porn (kiddie porn, bestiality, snuff). Since it was a distributed system, no one entity was in control of what was there. ISPs, wanting to attract customers with some kind of "free" content, ran Usenet servers. Not only was it difficult to try and decide which groups to block, it was actually technically impossible. How does a sysadmin know whether someone is posting bestiality pictures to a group called "rec.chess.discuss"? Does the ISP hire a roomful of people to try and look at each and every one of the millions of files distributed every day? No. Back then many ISPs took a stand and simply put warnings in their TOS that there may be offensive/illegal material there and in all sorts of other places on the internet and that it was the CUSTOMER's responsibility to surf wisely.
There were some overzealous prosecutors (there was a big case in Buffalo, NY) that tried to get the anti-smut vote by busting ISPs and taking their Usenet servers away, but this accomplished little. The Usenet server was not much more than a giant cache. Articles came in, and aged out after a preset number of days. You know which ISPs got in the most trouble? The ones that tried to filter certain groups. They were worried and thought they'd try to filter the unfilterable. By doing so, they assumed responsibility for what got on that server, and that really bit them in the ass.
Now, today both WISPs and cable have "that upload problem" where P2P traffic is exactly what you don't need to maintain consistent service for all of your customers. I say that if you want to be safe and filter anything, do it for TECHNICAL reasons, not content reasons. Spell this out in your TOS. If you lose a customer because they can't be a P2P host, so be it. If someone is hosting a file via P2P and you've got 60 people hitting that and generating a ton of little packets that kill your performance for everyone, use that as a reason to block.
And take the DMCA takedown notices with a grain of salt. They are written to intimidate the ISP and the customer. You are a carrier; until someone walks in with a subpoena, all bets are off. |
