Applied Miscellany

From Risks Digest 24.18 (which obtained the information from Slashdot):

An anonymous reader writes “The New Jersey legislature is considering a bill [link] that would require operators of public forums to collect users’ legal names and addresses, and effectively disallow anonymous speech on online forums. This raises some serious issues, such as to what extent local and state governments can go in enacting and enforcing Internet legislation.”

The key provisions of the bill are:

2. The operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish, maintain and enforce a policy to require any information content provider who posts written messages on a public forum website either to be identified by a legal name and address, or to register a legal name and address with the operator of the interactive computer service or the Internet service provider through which the information content provider gains access to the interactive computer service or Internet, as appropriate.

3. An operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.

The bill would make any operator of an “interactive computer service” (e.g., comments in a weblog) or an ISP liable to damages caused by a posting if the operator did not enforce section 2 (above) of the bill.

Peter G. Neumann, chairman of ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, states:

This of course would have considerable impact on all Internet newsgroups, and opens up the question of liability that out-of-state moderators would have. It also greatly increases the difficulties for whistle-blowers who might wish to publicly air vital concerns without the obvious risks of retribution. Seems like a bad piece of legislation to me.

This would also have a tremendous impact on operators of weblogs. To what extent would operators have to go to ensure that the name and address provided was accurate? Would they be required to periodically verify that the contact information is current? If someone posts an item that becomes a thread, would they be obligated to take down the entire thread if the person can no longer be contacted?

Sounds like a bad piece of legislation to me, too.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Privacy, All. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.