======================================================================== COMPUTER LAWYER E-NEWS Issue #001 March 3, 1996 News and views on new media, telecommunications and computer law for legal practitioners. ======================================================================== COMPUSERVE PUTS CONTROVERSIAL NEWS GROUPS BACK ONLINE In December 1995, a German prosecutor suggested to CompuServe that it should block access to 200 Usenet newsgroups which the prosecutor believed violated Germany's pornography laws. The news groups in question contained indecent language or images of nudity and pornography (for instance "alt.sex.bestiality"). CompuServe, lacking the facilities to selectively block access in only certain countries, blocked access to these news groups for all its 4.3 million subscribers worldwide. The ban was lifted on all but five of the news groups in mid-February. The five in question are suspected of carrying child pornography and all have "paedophilia" in their title. The reinstatement follows CompuServe's introduction of Cyber Patrol parental control software which can provide individual users with the ability to restrict access to certain content. America Online and Prodigy had already made similar parental-control technology available to their subscribers. ANOTHER BAN IN GERMANY Just when the CompuServe problem was settling down, another German online service, Deutsche Telekom's T-Online Service, with more than 1 million German customers, announced that it was blocking access to a World Wide Web site belonging to Ernst Zundel. This "voluntary" ban followed a warning from a German state prosecutor who advised the company that they were investigating whether the service was "helping to incite racial hatred". ISPs MAY BE FORCED TO REPORT CUSTOMER ACCESS TO SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIALS Virginia's House Committee on Corporations, Insurance and Banking is considering a bill, the "Information Infrastructure Providers-Disclosure of Sexually Explicit Content", that would force Internet Service Providers to report their customers' access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. INTERNET ISPs ASKED TO CENSOR CONTENT In early January, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, based in Los Angeles, sent out letters to hundreds of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) asking them to refuse to carry content that "promote racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem and violence." PROTECTION OF TRADEMARKS ON THE NET A new bill has been introduced in the California Senate (No. SB1533) concerning the unauthorized electronic use of a trademark. The bill is very broad in scope and extends to domain names and individual user names. There is no need to prove likelihood of confusion or dilution of a trademark. Passage of this bill would raise interesting jurisdictional issues. COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT A lot of activity has been taking place in the US since the recent passage of the Communications Decency Act. The ACLU, along with the EFF and other organizations, have commenced court actions to have the law declared unconstitutional. Temporary restraining orders have been issued and, according to the ACLU, the federal government has agreed not to initiate investigations or prosecute under the "indecency" or "patently offensive" provisions of the Act until the court has ruled. There has been speculation that the law was passed for political reasons and that many of its advocates knew that it would eventually not likely stand constitutional challenges. US ENCRYPTION POLICY MAY BE CHANGING Network Computing, in an exclusive report which will appear in the March 15, 1996 issue (or its web site at http://techweb.cmp.com/nwc), details possible changes to US policy on encryption. The White House is reportedly considering the possibility of allowing companies to hold their own encryption key. This would make it difficult for the government to eavesdrop without first going to a business to obtain the relevant keys. The US government in also reportedly considering easing restrictions on the carrying of software with strong encryption abroad for personal. HOW TO EXPORT PRODUCTS WITH 64-BIT ENCRYPTION KEYS? Two versions of Notes were available in the past. A North American version that supported a 64-bit encryption key and an international version which provided a weaker and exportable form of encryption. The recent version supports a 64-bit encryption key in the international version but the US government is provided with access to 24 bits. The net result is that a message encrypted using Notes is easy to decipher by US government agencies but very difficult for anyone else to decode. This may be the reason that representatives of certain foreign governments have indicated to Netscape, a leading vendor of Web browsers, that they oppose the US government holding part of an encryption key. LAW OF CYBERSPACE PAPERS The University of Chicago has announced that papers from its symposium on "The Law of Cyberspace" are available at its web page (http://www-law.lib.uchicago.edu/forum/). US v THOMAS UPHELD The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld US v. Thomas, the conviction in Tennessee of Robert and Carleen Thomas for violating federal obscenity laws in connection with the operation in Milpitas, California of their "Amateur Action" computer bulletin board (BBS). The Court held that in determining obscenity, the community standards to be applied should be those of the geographic area where the materials are sent to or accessed from rather than where the BBS is located. UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY LAW-RELATED CONFERENCES ABA Techshow March 21-23, 1996 (Chicago) (312) 988-5619 Connecticut Law Review Symposium on LEGAL REGULATION OF THE INTERNET April 2, 1996 (University of Connecticut Law School) The Symposium is open to the public and admission is free. For more information, contact Hank Snyder at (860) 241-4607. 1996 Computer & Telecommunications Law Update and World Computer Law Congress The Computer Law Association, Inc. April 25-26, 1996 (Washington) (703) 560-7747 Protecting Intellectual Property in Digital Technology and the Internet American Conference Institute May 9 & 10, 1996 (New York) (416) 927-7936 or E-Mail: mktg@clcomm.com New and Emerging Legal Issues on the Internet The Canadian Institute May 14, 1996 (Toronto) 416-927-7936 ======================================================================== © 1996 by Alan Gahtan (http://www.io.org/~agahtan). Copyright and responsibility for content in individual submissions remain with the author. 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