Computer underground Digest Thu July 10, 1997 Volume 9 : Issue 55 ISSN 1004-042X Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu) News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu) Archivist: Brendan Kehoe Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala Ian Dickinson Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest CONTENTS, #9.55 (Thu, July 10, 1997) File 1--Internet Law Heads-Up File 2--(fwd) Porn and the Liability of Internet Providers File 3--Green Card Spammer Laurence Canter Disbarred in Tennessee File 4--Star Wars, Fanfiction, and Big Eight Newsgroup Creation File 5--U.S. Justice Dept. Investigating Network Solutions File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997) CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Jul 97 12:06:36 -0400 From: Internet Law Heads-Up Subject: File 1--Internet Law Heads-Up =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= INTERNET LAW HEADS-UP #6 by Les Black heads-up@webchoice.com July 1, 1997 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Internet Law Heads-Up is alive and well! Welcome to the sixth issue of my periodic e-mail letter on how law and lawmakers are impacting the net. E-mail subscriptions to Internet Law Heads-Up are free. Please see the end of this letter for subscription information. Here's what's in this issue: 1. DING DONG THE CDA IS DEAD! 2. A CAT-BASED DOG 3. PICS AND CLICKS 4. CDA II? 5. WE ARE WINNING 6. THE FINE PRINT =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= DING DONG THE CDA IS DEAD! "The record demonstrates that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal. As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship." With these words, the United States Supreme Court, on June 26, 1997, laid to rest the government's final argument in support of the Communications Decency Act. The government had contended that the CDA is needed to foster the growth of the internet (we're from Washington and we're here to help you). The Court found this argument "singularly unpersuasive". The Court found the government's numerous other arguments unpersuasive, too. In holding that the CDA's "indecent transmission" and "patently offensive display" provisions infringe upon the protections of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court forged a landmark decision. Justices Scalia and Thomas, the Supreme Court's cultural conservatives, joined in the majority opinion with Justices Ginsburg and Souter, arguably the Court's cultural liberals. Preserving the right of free speech on the internet, it turns out, is both a conservative and a liberal tenet. The Supreme Court Justices, non-geeks who grew up when calcul- ation meant slide rules and cut-and-paste meant scissors and Elmer's, *got it*. Not just got it about freedom of speech - that's their realm. Got it about the net. A CAT-BASED DOG "The Internet is 'a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication,'" writes Justice John Paul Stevens, citing the District Court decision that the Supreme Court affirmed. Significantly, unlike heavily-regulated radio and television, the internet should receive the full protection of the First Amendment, Justice Stevens writes, because prior cases "provide no basis for qualifying the level of scrutiny that should be applied to this medium." They got it. Well, seven of the nine Justices got it. In her concur-in-part dissent-in-part opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, swallows the government's misguided analogy that a federal law criminalizing internet indecency is similar to a local zoning ordinance. Cyberspace, to Justice O'Connor, is a place, just like Chicago. "Cyberspace undeniably reflects some form of geography," she writes. But, as Internet Law Heads-Up #4 explained, Cyberspace is more like Gertrude Stein's Oakland - there's no there there. The internet is not a geographical location. It is, as Internet Law Heads-Up #1 called it, a Big Conversation. A Big Conversation that the First Amendment fully safeguards. To be fair, Justice O'Connor does admit that the "electronic world is fundamentally different" from the world of X-Rated flicks and peep shows that can be zoned away from *nice* neighborhoods. Then, however, she comes up with something called "user-based zoning", which is a contradiction, like a cat-based dog. Zoning, by its very definition, can not be user-based. Zoning is defined as government regulation of how you can use your land and your buildings. You can not create your own zoning. Justice O'Connor, undeterred by such logic, writes, "This user-based zoning is accomplished through the use of screening software (such as Cyber Patrol or SurfWatch) or browsers with screening capabilities, both of which search addresses and text for keywords that are associated with 'adult' sites and, if the user wishes, blocks access to such sites. The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) project is designed to facilitate user-based zoning by encouraging Internet speakers to rate the content of their speech using codes recognized by all screening programs." Justice O'Connor calls these techniques "progress". But screening programs, while restricting access to some (but far from all) internet pornography, also intentionally filter out vital and legitimate web sites. And PICS may do worse. CLICKS AND PICS The darker practices of purveyors of screening software have come under increased scrutiny. CyberWire Dispatch, an e-mail letter, received an award last month from the Computer Press Association for its 1996 investigative story, "Keys to the Kingdom" by Brock Meeks and Declan McCullagh, that began the exposure of these practices. Cybersitter, for example, blocks such non-pornographic sites as now.org, sponsored by the National Association for Women, apparently because they endorse gay and lesbian rights. CyberPatrol blocks motherjones.com, the web site of Mother Jones magazine, allegedly because of its political extremism. When Peacefire, a youth anti-censorship group whose web site appears devoid of any pornography, publicized Cybersitter's willy-nilly approach to blocking sites it disagrees with, Cybersitter responded by blocking peacefire.org. *** Heads-Up Bookmark: For more examples of blocked sites, see . There you can use a search engine to "peek at the guts of five Net-filtering programs: CyberSitter, NetNanny, SurfWatch, The Internet Filter, and CyberPatrol." The search engine is maintained by Pathfinder, a mainstream web site operated by Time New Media, the online division of Time magazine. According to this search engine, Cybersitter is - you guessed it - also blocking pathfinder.com. With the exception of NetNanny, screening programs encrypt their list of blocked sites, frustrating objective evaluation of their agendas. But it appears relatively easy to crack their encryption. It appears relatively easy to crack their programs, too. One of my top-secret computer-whiz sources says, "I'm sorry, but censorware does not work at all. It just doesn't. There are a million ways to get around it." OK, this source is 14 years old, so what does he know? ;-) While screening censorware may be a keystone cybercop, PICS could be a censor's best friend. PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is an HTML site labeling standard that allows individual users, Internet Service Providers and even whole countries to suppress site content by scanning invisible tags which identify what type of content the site contains. According to Lawrence Lessig, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, PICS "will have a devastating effect on free speech all over the world." Writing in the July, 1997 issue of Wired magazine, Professor Lessig calls PICS "an extremely versatile and robust censorship tool - not just for parents who want to protect their kids, but for censors of any sort. PICS will make it easier for countries like China or Singapore to 'clean up' the Net; it makes it easier for companies to control what their employees can see; it makes it easier for libraries or schools to prevent patrons from viewing controversial sites." Sinister? Perhaps - until some enterprising cyberfreek hacks a workaround (which should take about 45 minutes). CDA II? Those of us who websurf for a living and, when we're not on the clock, websurf for giggles, know that, while cyberporn exists, it does not just ooze out of the internet on its own. As the Supreme Court stated in its CDA decision, "the 'odds are slim' that a user would enter a sexually explicit site by accident." By the time a teenager has figured out how to access smut in cyberspace, the same teenager has probably accessed more than a few dirty pictures in meatspace, too. But from the way some opponents characterize the ruling, you would think that the Supreme Court told pornographers that they can open their doors to children on the internet. For example, here is the opening sentence of a press release from the Family Research Council: "Today's ruling means that pornographers can open their doors to children on the Internet." In fact, there is a perfectly good CDA II already on the books. 47 USCA 223(a) provides in pertinent part: "Whoever (1) in interstate or foreign communications..., by means of a telecommunications device knowingly (i) makes, creates, or solicits, and (ii) initiates the transmission of, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene [words deleted], knowing that the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age, regardless of whether the maker of such communication placed the call or initiated the communication; .... [or] (2) knowingly permits any telecommunications facility under his control to be used for any activity prohibited by paragraph (1) with the intent that it be used for such activity, shall be fined under Title 18, or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." Recognize this law? It's part of the Communications Decency Act with the words "or indecent" deleted by order of the Supreme Court. In its decision, the Supreme Court stated, "Appellees do not challenge the application of the statute to obscene speech, which, they acknowledge, can be banned because it enjoys no First Amendment protection.... Therefore, we will sever the term "or indecent" from the statute, leaving the rest of Section 223(a) standing." That's hardly letting pornographers "open their doors to children on the internet." The word "obscene" has a judicially-defined meaning. The word "indecent" has no set legal meaning, either by statutory definition or by court precedent. The vagueness of regulating indecency, Justice Stevens writes, "raises special First Amendment concerns because of its obvious chilling effect on free speech". With a potential penalty of two years in jail and a hefty fine, the CDA could have silenced even such speech as "a serious discussion about birth control practices" for fear that a minor might log on to the discussion and some prosecutor might find it indecent. The Supreme Court's historic decision makes a another content-based CDA unlikely. Most policy-makers within the Administration, and many members of Congress, have given up the notion of directly regulating internet indecency. Unfortunately, these same political leaders are now falling over themselves in a rush to promote the use of screening software and website labeling. Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) has filed a "Parental Empowerment Through Marketplace Solutions" Bill (h.r. 1964, sec. 103) which would mandate that ISP's offer screening software to their customers "either at no charge or for a fee that does not exceed the cost of such software to such provider." Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) says that she will introduce a "Childsafe Internet Act" which would give every parent with a computer "access to filtering software" and make it a crime to mis-rate web sites or "steal sites previously rated as childsafe". Other lawmakers are proposing similar bills, while the White House continues to call for a so-called V-chip for the internet. This time let's hope cooler heads prevail. And if Congress holds hearings on these ill-advised proposals, something they never did before passing the CDA, let's *help* cooler heads prevail by pointing out the limits and dangers of the proposals. Screening software and site labeling are ideas whose time has come - and gone. WE ARE WINNING The Supreme Court is not the only Court that has been busy protecting free speech on the internet. On June 20, 1997, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, in American Library Association v. Pataki (Docket #97 Civ. 0222 - LAP), enjoined New York State from enforcing its own CDA, calling it "an unconstitutional intrusion into interstate commerce" because the "unique nature of the Internet highlights the likelihood that a single actor might be subject to haphazard, uncoordinated, and even outright inconsistent regulation" by the 50 states. Judge Loretta Preska stated in her decision, "Typically, states' jurisdictional limits are related to geography; geography, however, is a virtually meaningless construct on the Internet." Judge Preska's decision includes a detailed discussion of how packet switches and caches apply to interstate commerce and refers to the "marvels" of the internet. Clearly, Judge Preska *got it* about the net. On the same day, United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, in American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia v. Miller (Docket #1:96-cv-2475-MHS), enjoined the state of Georgia from enforcing a law which would have made it a crime to use a pseudonym as an internet screen name or to use a trademark logo as a web link. Holding that the Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits by proving "that the statute imposes content-based restrictions which are not narrowly tailored to achieve the state's purported compelling interest" and "that the statute is overbroad and void for vagueness", Judge Marvin Shoob supported the internet in granting the Plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction. Judge Shoob, too, *got it* about the net. *** Heads-Up Bookmark: The full texts of the New York, Georgia and Supreme Court internet law decisions are available online at . Anyone who has ever stood up in a Courtroom and announced, "Ready to proceed, Your Honor", knows how much hard work goes before those words. Internet Law Heads-Up congratulates the lawyers and staff people, including some of my readers, who devoted so much energy to achieving victory in these cases. Yes, we are winning. We can pat ourselves on the back now. But, as Brock Meeks wrote on the day after the Supreme Court's CDA decision, "Just as soon as everyone is finished patting themselves on the back they should just as quickly give themselves a swift kick in the ass because if you think the court's decision brings an end to this issue, you're sorely misguided. There's a hell of a lot of work still ahead." What's your response? I look forward to hearing from you at heads-up@webchoice.com. And I look forward to corresponding with you again soon. Virtually, Les Black, Attorney-at-Law Publisher, Internet Law Heads-Up & Les Black's Internet Publishing Legal Alert E-Mail: lesblack@webchoice.com Voice: (508) 544-3941 Fax: (508) 544-3995 Warwick, Massachusetts, USA =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= THE FINE PRINT. Internet Law Heads-Up welcomes your comments, questions, rants, raves and concurring or dissenting opinions. Please e-mail them to heads-up@webchoice.com. All original material in Internet Law Heads-Up is copyright 1997 by Les Black. For permission to display, reproduce or distribute all or part of this issue, please contact Les Black at lesblack@webchoice.com. Internet Law Heads-Up is not intended to provide direct legal advice. Nothing contained in Internet Law Heads-Up is intended to invoke, establish or solicit an Attorney-Client relationship between Attorney Les Black and any recipient. 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To request back issues of Internet Law Heads-Up, please send e-mail to heads-up@webchoice.com with Archives (Your Name) in the subject line and the number or date of the issue you want in the body of your message. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 6 Jul 1997 15:37:14 +0000 From: David Smith Subject: File 2--(fwd) Porn and the Liability of Internet Providers This is from the July 1997 issue of the Ethical Spectacle (http://www.spectacle.org/797/netpics.html) Porn and the Liability of Internet Providers by Jonathan Wallace and Mark Mangan In late 1995, Bentley Ives, a manager for the U.S. Postal Service, had a great new idea for an Internet business: a service specializing in finding free smut. By December he had incorporated WebbWorld and, employing the help of two associates to handle the technical and administrative duties, set up the Netpics website. The three created no original content, but rather trolled the open channels of Internet newsgroups looking for pornographic pictures--pulling down nearly 6 thousand a day--and making them available to subscribers for $12 a month. In June 1996 a California man tipped off the Fort Worth police and about debased porn peddlers in their midst who were distributing obscenity to the world. Perhaps a smut competitor himself or maybe just a worried citizen who didn't like the service he had subscribed to, the man gave the authorities the web address, www.netpics.com, and a password to access it. In mid February of 1997, the Fort Worth Vice Squad came looking for Ives. They searched his office seized his computer and arrested him for distributing obscenity and child pornography. After an eight month investigation the police found its fill of sexual images depicting groups, gays, lesbians, boys, girls, porn stars and senior citizens. They were looking for obscenity; however, among the nearly 1.5 million pictures that passed through the Netpics servers during this time, they also found some child pornography. After consulting a doctor at Cook Children's Medical Center they deemed four images to involve children under 15 and another of a girl under 11. Looking around the sparse office, the Police demanded to know where the big computer equipment was. Ives led them to the new office in Dallas, where he had recently moved to share space with the Internet service which provided Webbworld with access to the Net through its fat T3 feed. With the cooperation of the Dallas police, they arrived at the second office and cleaned out the place--seizing all 16 servers and more than a thousand pieces of computer equipment. According to the Netpics principals in an exclusive interview with Gene Crick of the Texas Telecommunications Journal, the police showed no discretion, taking "routers, monitors, software, data records and everything... desk, chair... they even took the pencils...." Ives was released on $52,500 bail after being arraigned on obscenity and child pornography charges. Between the two charges, one a midemeanor, the other a third degree felony, he faces up to 12 years in a state penitentary and up to $20,000 in fines. A couple months later the police caught up with the other two Netpics principals: Benjamin Brian Ellis and James Lewis Gurkin, III. Gurkin is a 31 year old owner of a security guard business and handled the payroll, bookkeeping, and other administrative duties, receiving 25% of the profits. Ellis, a 27 year old computer consultant, was the technical genius behind the company and received 50% of the profits. Ellis set up the servers, configured the systems and developed what Lieutenant Reflogal of the Fort Worth Police called an "outstanding program"--a piece of code that trolled the Usenet groups that carried pornographic images, downloaded the pictures, then uploaded them to their webservers, placing them in particular categories depending where they were found. Usenet is the name of a portion of the Internet which is essentially a conglomeration of electronic bulletin boards, most of which are unmoderated. Allowing users to anonymously post content, it represents a free-wheeling global discussion, broken up into thousands of different subjects. For those that want to discuss programming languages there are groups like comp.lang; for those that want to talk about cars there are groups like alt.autos and rec.autos; and for those that like to look at porn pictures, there's alt.sex.pictures, rec.nude, etc. There is no centralized control of Usenet. A message that is posted to alt.autos, for instance, is sent from server to server around the world and copied to all those which subscribe to this newsgroup. Anyone with an Internet connection and a newsgroup reader can freely sift through any and all newsgroups to which his Internet provider subscribes. With about 14 thousand newsgroups out there passing around terabytes of information daily, Ives decided to make a service that made finding porn in this global soup of information easy. Netpics also offered other services, such as email, web development and secure transaction services; however, the bread and butter for the company was smut. Plugging into an existing Internet Access Provider and configuring servers to subscribe to about 175 newsgroups devoted to porn, the tits, ass, penis, and vagina images started pouring in. Evidently aware that there were laws against obscenity and child pornography, the Netpics people announced on the site that "we do make an effort to keep illegal pictures out of our selection." But with over ten thousand new pictures floating through these groups every day and as many as 6,000 being added to the site, they were clearly not able to see every porn picture that passed through their servers, hard as they may have tried. At any one time Netpics had about 70,000 pictures on its site, with images being sloughed off the servers every 3 to 4 days. The charges of obscenity and child pornography require that the offender "knowingly and willingly" possesses or distributes the material. In contrast, the Netpics principals argue that they never created any of the images that existed on the newsgroups, that they did not subscribe to the groups that were known to carry child porn, and that they actively sifted through pictures 3-4 hours a day looking for potentially illegal material. In the interview with Gene Crick the Netpics collective said, "we offered only the same Usenet lists and contents available on thousands of Internet servers around the world. And while we featured adult-oriented newsgroups, we took exhaustive measures to eliminate any content we felt might even resemble child pornography." Lieutenant Reflogal, formerly of the vice squad that conducted the investigation, says there was no doubt about what was on the newsgroups from which they were downloading, pointing out that one in particular had the words "teen fuck" in its address. "To me," he said, "'teen fuck' is pretty evident of what kind of pictures you're going to be getting." He added that the fact that they found child porn changed the nature of the charges brought, but not the vigor of the investigation: they were looking for obscenity. Netpics trafficked in obscenity, by almost any local community standard. The kinds of images which course through the more hardcore Usenet forums involve extreme sexual situations, portraying anal sex, oral sex, explicit penetration, dildos, orgies, and all kinds of deviant sexual activity. In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court defined the term obscenity with a simple, subjective three-prong test, which said that the material must appeal to the prurient interest (turn you on), be patently offensive (gross you out), and be devoid of any scientific, artistic, literary, or political value--all this according to local community standards. Barring the local communities of 42nd Street, Manhattan and the neon-lit Las Vegas strips, it is a fair assumption to say that the more hardcore newsgroups on the Internet are obscene. So, in a sense, Sprint, MCI, AT&T, and all access providers which carry these newsgroups and allow these pictures to pass through their servers are as guilty as Ives. The fundamental question arising from this case is, what is the liability of Internet Service Providers? In the distributed world of the Internet, who is responsible for illegal material that is anonymously posted and passed around from computer to computer in massive streams of neverending data? Obscenity and child pornography are not the only kinds of material that present such problems. If chapter after chapter of Grisham's latest novel started appearing on newsgroups, could each and every ISP which which carried these newsgroups be held liable for copyright infringement? The Texas events must be viewed against a backdrop of current legal actions, threatened and real, against Internet service providers. Though Netpics was an attractive legal target for the prosecutor because it specialized in sex-related newsgroups, the acts its principals are accused of committing consist merely of having made these newsgroups available to users--the same "crime" committed by numerous other service providers, including large commercial ventures, small local companies, and universities. The responsibility of an online information provider for illegal information transmitted across its service by a third party is still heavily debated, though it appeared to be pretty well settled by a 1980's case, Cubby v. Compuserve. The plaintiff claimed that he had been libelled by false statements posted to a Compuserve forum by an anonymous user and sued Compuserve. In dismissing the case against Compuserve, a federal judge reached back more than thirty years to a Supreme Court case involving a bookstore owner. In that case, Smith v. California, the high court had ruled that the owner of a bookstore could not be held responsible for knowing the contents of every book in the store. Thus, he could not be convicted for selling illegal material unless there was actual proof he knew it was there in his store. Similarly, the plaintiff could not hold Compuserve responsible for the libel without first putting them on notice that the offending statement was there. Though now an ancient case in terms of the fast-moving world of the Internet, Cubby has been cited approvingly by most courts and commentators that have dealt with similar issues since, and there is little doubt that it has been generally adopted as the right rule for the Internet. All it actually requires is that a party--whether a prosecutor or a private plaintiff--complaining about material made available via an ISP put the service on notice of the objectionable material. If the service fails to act, the Cubby rule has been satisfied, and the complaining party is free to take action. If the complaining party fails to issue a warning, in any lawsuit or prosecution it later brings it will have the very tough--in many cases, insurmountable--task of showing that the defendant was personally aware of the objectionable material. The Texas prosecutor may possibly make use of an exception to Cubby, which derives from another online case called Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. This much-criticized case also involved a lawsuit for libel as a result of remarks posted on the Prodigy service. While endorsing the Cubby case, the Prodigy judge came to a different conclusion. Though the plaintiff here had failed to put Prodigy on notice before bringing the lawsuit, the judge let the case continue anyway because Prodigy had advertised itself as a family-freindly service in which user messages were carefully screened for illegal content. The Prodigy decision has been criticized for an illogical, even anti-social conclusion: if you attempt to keep your service clean and fail, you are in a worse legal position than if you do absolutely nothing. Most commentators agree that Prodigy is bad law--but the prosecutor may argue that the Netpics defendants should be convicted because they claimed to screen out all child porn from their service and failed to do so. Similar events involving ISP's are taking place on the international stage which are related to the Netpics case. Germany has just indicted a local Compuserve manager for distributing obscene material because Compuserve, as an ISP, grants access to the alt.sex newsgroups. Here, the facts more clearly support the defendants than in the Netpics case, as the German government cannot even make the claim that Compuserve pushed this material or encouraged users to concentrate on it. Gene Crick, who also sits on the board of Electronic Frontiers Austin, has been watching the Netpics case carefully. "Conviction in this case could shut down the Usenet; the images being prosecuted were also stored on other feed servers around the world. This means every Usenet provider could become an appealing target for political grandstanders and hungry tort lawyers," Crick says. Shutting down porn operations are very visible, politically popular cases for righteous minded law enforcement agencies. In shutting down Netpics, the Fort Worth police acted with broad strokes that may have violated certain Fourth Amendment protections concerning proper search and seizure; they also seemed to have created some jurisdictional entanglements as they stepped into Dallas to make the arrest. As of now, the members of Netpics have not yet been indicted and the police have said they would not seek action against any of the subscribers. If they do decide to carry through and prosecute, this could become a seminal case. If not, the police have still achieved their real goal--shutting down the Netpics servers. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 21:49:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Keith Dreibelbis Subject: File 3--Green Card Spammer Laurence Canter Disbarred in Tennessee ((MODERATORS' NOTE: We called the Board of Professional Responsibility in Tennessee today (615-361-7500) and confirmed that the press release is authentic. We were also told by the person involved in handling the case that Canter is now divorced from Martha Siegel and currently living in California. For those who've forgotten, Canter and Siegel were the infamous "Green Card" spammers who wrote an in-your-face book defending spamming as a way to make your fortune on the Internet. For more details, see CUD 7.50 (1975).)) --- Date--9 Jul 1997 03:19:32 GMT From--"David E. Fox" Due to popular demand (well, an email from Ron Newman - I guess that counts as popular demand) ;) I've been asked to post the verbatim letter. Actually, I got two letters - one that just says that the investigation concluded in a disbarment, and says that my cooperation and interest in assisting the legal profession is appreciated. The other one is the press release; that's the one I'm typing in. ------------------------------------------------------------ News Release Contact: William W. Hunt, III [Tennessee] Board of Professional Responsibility 615-361-7500 June 16, 1997 Arizona Attorney Disbarred On June 5, 1997, The Supreme Court of Tennessee entered an order disbarring Laurence A. Canter with law offices in Scottsdale, Arizona; Cupertino and San Rafael, California, but licensed to practice law in Tennessee. Mr. Canter also received a one year suspension to be served concurrently with a disbarment. This order was based on a recommendation of a hearing panel after a hearing in this case. Mr. Canter was fould guilty of numerous offenses of the Attorneys' Code of Professional Responsibility (Rule 8, Rules of the Supreme Court of Tennessee). In 1994 in an incident reported in the national media he placed an advertisement that appeared on more than 5,000 of the Internet's news groups as well as 10,000 of E-Mail lists. The posting appeared on computer screens unsolicited and each reader was required to read at least a portion of the message. The hearing panel found that the posting violated Tennessee's advertising rules DR 2-101 and was an improper intrusion into the recipient's privacy violating Disciplinary Rule 1-102(A)(1)(5)(6). Mr. Canter also represented Mr. Shafgul Islam in an immigration matter. Mr. Canter failed to adequately communicate with Mr. Islam, charged Mr. Islam an improper non-refundable retainer, failed to return Mr. Islam his file and improperly demanded Mr. Islam provide him a "full release." Mr. Canter was also hired by Mr. A. M. Jaffee relative to an incorporation of a business and two immigration matters. Mr. Canter Failed to adequately communicate with his client, neglected his client's matters and mis-appropriated $350 he held in trust for his client. In a fourth matter, Mr. Canter withheld funds from the paycheck of an employee Sandra Colvis to pay taxes and health insurance premiums, misappropriated funds to his own use and failed to pay them to the proper authorities. The paychecks made out to Ms. Colvis were also returned for insufficient funds. ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jul 1997 02:48:17 -0700 From: Russ Allbery Subject: File 4--Star Wars, Fanfiction, and Big Eight Newsgroup Creation The policy of the current Big Eight newsgroup creation system on newsgroups devoted to fanfiction has recently been criticized here. (The Big Eight are the comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, and talk hierarchies.) Here's what that policy actually is and a little background on the reason for it. First of all, please realize that the Big Eight is not all of Usenet. It is just eight specific Usenet hierarchies; there are many, *many* more. Each hierarchy is created for a different purpose and has a different set of rules for creating new groups in that hierarchy. A major goal of the Big Eight is to provide a relatively small set of widely useful newsgroups that are maintained by a central newsgroup creation system. Ideally, every system carrying the Big Eight will have precisely the same set of newsgroups; solid propagation and consistency across different news servers are the major feature of this sort of approach to newsgroup creation. Obviously this procedure does *not* work for all topics, given that a voting procedure is involved (and therefore the possibility of a group being voted down for political reasons exists) and given that news administrators may not want certain types of groups created automatically without their review. This is precisely why alt.* was created originally; alt.* has a wide-open creation policy and therefore is home to the sorts of groups that couldn't be created in the Big Eight for whatever reason. (The tradeoff, of course, being that alt.* groups are often subject to manual review at each site and tend to be much less consistent across different news sites.) Now, about the proposed Star Wars stories group. Fanfiction (fiction using trademarked or copyrighted characters and backgrounds without the permission of the owners) has always been of questionable legality and subject to the occasional lawsuit in the United States and elsewhere. Due to the way intellectual property laws work in the United States, fanfiction *may* be illegal and if a news site is knowingly carrying a newsgroup devoted solely to fanfiction, it *may* be possible to sue them as well as the authors for the violation. No, it's probably not very *likely* that a news site would be sued. But this *has* been an often-stated concern by news administrators in the past. Keep in mind the purpose of the Big Eight, namely to create a set of useful newsgroups that can be created automatically at all the subscribing sites. Due to this *possible* legal concern, a large number of news administrators do not want newsgroups devoted to fanfiction automatically created on their news servers, and therefore would not be able to just let the Big Eight newsgroup creation process run automatically on their servers if the Big Eight includes those groups. This directly hurts one of the primary purposes of the hierarchies. Therefore, newsgroups which are devoted to fanfiction are against the rules of the Big Eight unless the proponent can show reasonable evidence that the groups would not cause a legal problem. Some proponents do in fact do precisely that. rec.arts.anime.creative exists because anime and manga companies do not, as a matter of general policy, prosecute fanfiction, so the legal concern is minimal. rec.arts.comics.creative exists because its charter requires that stories posted there use original characters. Other groups have been proposed with no problems before because they would have been for parody. The proponents of the Star Wars group were considering changing their charter to require parody or original characters and background, which would make the group fine under those rules. If a group can't fit under those rules, it most certainly isn't censored. It simply needs to be created in a different hierarchy that has looser rules, such as alt.*. People create fanfiction groups in alt.* routinely and some of them are quite successful. Also, please note that no *post* is refused. The newsgroup creation system has nothing to do with individual posts; it has to do with newsgroups. One can post pretty much anything one wishes to any unmoderated group, and the newsgroup creation system doesn't affect that in the slightest. The only thing this policy affects is whether a newsgroup devoted to fanfiction can be created in this particular set of hierarchies. Finally, this policy obviously doesn't affect discussion, including discussion of fanfiction, as should be obvious from the five existing discussion groups devoted to Star Wars. Discussion of fanfiction is certainly on-topic in rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc and absolutely nothing prevents it from being posted there. Hopefully this clarifies the situation somewhat. This policy, just like all other Big Eight newsgroup creation policies, tends to get discussed periodically on news.groups, and anyone with questions or concerns about it is certainly welcome to raise the issue there or contact me directly. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Jul 1997 23:48:58 -0500 From: jthomas@SUN.SOCI.NIU.EDU(Jim Thomas) Subject: File 5--U.S. Justice Dept. Investigating Network Solutions Source - The New York Times, 7 July '97 U.S. Justice Dept. Investigating Network Solutions By AGIS SALPUKAS The Justice Department has begun an investigation into the practice of assigning Internet addresses to determine if the control that Network Solutions Inc. exercises over the process amounts to a violation of antitrust laws. The investigation was disclosed by the company Thursday in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing came as part of a proposed initial stock offering that is intended to raise $35 million. The investigation was first reported in The Washington Post on Sunday. Network Solutions, which is based in Herndon, Va., and is a subsidiary of Science Applications International Corp., has been the target of a growing chorus of complaints and two dozen lawsuits as the Internet has expanded and the competition for these addresses, or domain names, has grown more intense. Related Sites Network Solutions Inc. http://www.netsol.com Securities and Exchange Commission http://www.sec.gov The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com Science Applications International Corp. http://www.saic.com National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov Copyright 1997 The New York Times ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 May 1997 22:51:01 CST From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997) Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. CuD is available as a Usenet newsgroup: comp.society.cu-digest Or, to subscribe, send post with this in the "Subject:: line: SUBSCRIBE CU-DIGEST Send the message to: cu-digest-request@weber.ucsd.edu DO NOT SEND SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THE MODERATORS. The editors may be contacted by voice (815-753-6436), fax (815-753-6302) or U.S. mail at: Jim Thomas, Department of Sociology, NIU, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. 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