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[FYI] U.S.: Part of CDA well and alive?
- To: debate@fitug.de
- Subject: [FYI] U.S.: Part of CDA well and alive?
- From: "Axel H Horns" <horns@t-online.de>
- Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 20:10:22 +0100
- Comment: This message comes from the debate mailing list.
- Organization: PA Axel H Horns
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http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/yr/mo/cyber/cyberlaw/21law.html
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April 21, 2000
By CARL S. KAPLAN
Suit Against Anonymous Pest Revives Online Speech Law
little-known federal law restricting indecent speech online that many
lawyers thought was essentially dead has come back to life in Federal
District Court in Manhattan, to the chagrin of some civil
libertarians.
The law, an attempt to refurbish for the Internet age some older
statutes banning harassing phone calls, outlaws the use of a
telecommunications device, like a computer modem, to transmit
comments that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent"
when the intent is "to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another
person."
It is a small surviving part -- section 223(a)(1)(A) -- of the
Communications Decency Act of 1996. Two other better-known CDA
provisions, which would have banned the online transmission of
indecent speech to minors, were struck down by the United States
Supreme Court as violations of the First Amendment in a landmark
decision in 1997.
Earlier this month, in what may be the first lawsuit of its kind,
lawyers for an Internet company invoked the remaining part of the act
in a suit against a persistent pest.
In papers filed on April 11, New York-based About.com said that an
unknown person had been invading many of the company's chat rooms
since November 1999, including the alcoholism, dating and rodeo rooms
-- and, while impersonating the identities of regular chatters, had
flooded the rooms with "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and
indecent messages through interstate communications with the intent
to annoy, abuse, threaten and harass other people."
Because the company does not know the visitor's name, it sued the
unknown computer user who left behind a specific set of IP addresses,
the electronic footprints left on a Web server by any visitor to a
site. These can often be traced back to an Internet service provider.
[...]
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