On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 02:42:27PM +1300, Andy Linton wrote:
You could also get into the potentially dangerous ground of "your list checks for viruses and you failed in your duty of care to block a particular virus which then infected my system - send $5 to xxx(a)yyy as compensation".
IANAL but I can't see how you could enforce such a thing.
Let's say I run a list on my home machine and "large corporation X" gets infected and for some reason they decide it's my fault. Their lawyers get on the job and I get sucked into a legal battle. The courts don't really need to enforce anything if I can't afford to fight the case. I'll settle out of court if I can. Even if I do fight I suspect that if I've tried to operate in some kind of "common carrier" manner admitting no responsibility for policing the content of the mail I'm likely to be in better shape. Compare this with making decisions about the content of newsgroups or deciding on the appropriateness of domain names. In both those cases the advice I've seen is that as soon as you start checking in any way you can become responsible in all sorts of ways you didn't envisage. And you certainly can get sucked into legal battles as a co-defendant with those who initiated the offending message/tranaction etc. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog