Re: Australia's New South Wales tries net-censorship

[mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)]

"Robert A. Rosenberg" <hal9001@panix.com> writes:

 > At 17:47 4/6/96, David K. Merriman wrote:

 >> Makes me wonder if browser companies/authors couldn't be
 >> dragged into any such conflicts. If Person A inadvertently
 >> stumbles across Pedophiles 'R' Us on the net, and quickly
 >> moves on, I have yet to see a browser that lets him/her say
 >> "quick - delete that last cacheing operation", thus *making*
 >> him/her 'guilty' of criminal possession.

 > Netscape in the Cache Preferences has a button to delete
 > your cache contents so button would seem to serve this need
 > (while being a little overkill for this capability since it
 > deletes everything and you must then rebuild your cache from
 > scratch).

While I doubt that many people inadvertantly stumble across the
mother load of illegal porn on the Web, the "store and forward"
nature of Usenet can certainly create such problems, particularly
for those in the habit of grabbing all new messages in their
favorite newsgroups before reading them.

I'd be interested to know if the courts have ever had a case in
which a person has been declared to have been in "possession" of
illegal material merely by virtue of its momentary presence in
their cache, screen buffer, or usenet spool.

There is a case now involving the University of Pittsburgh in
which the Feds are attempting to prove that an individual was in
possession of certain child porn images on his own PC during a
brief span of time in 1993.

There was also a case in which a BBS operator was charged based
on an allegedly illegal image found in a directory containing
unchecked user uploads.  Had the cops done nothing, the image
would have been wiped shortly thereafter.

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $