(NOTE; aggregate reply; skirting the boundary of what is on topic or not so any replies that diverge further are probably best off the list) On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 03:44:46PM +1300, Andy Linton wrote: 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. But this can occur over anything whatsoever; presumably with or without (malicious) content filtering. I don't see how having or not having content filtering changes this whatsoever... ... also, is it not possible to have some kind of disclaimer and/or policy agreement as you do with software? It seems since that you cannot easily sue for software damages (which are not at all uncommon) then it should be possible to have someone draft some legalese for something which I would consider less intrusive. 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. Again, this would seem to apply to any medium where you are making or controlling distribution of the content is some way. On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 03:50:57PM +1300, Juha Saarinen wrote: NAIAL, but last time this was discussed with AL, it turned out that there are provisions of "due diligence" in Common Law, which state that you mustn't send out anything that can cause harm or damage, to others. NAIAL? Nor Am I a Lawyer? Again, I have to wonder where some kind of disclaimer isn't possible; for years large software companies not excluding Apple and Microsoft have been making software that from time to time unintentionally does considerable damage (completely erases your hard disk contents) and have thus far evaded mass legal annihilation[1] Is anyone aware at present of any lists which have disclaimers which subscribers must agree to? I would guess there are such things out there for large media organsiations, but in truth I never bother reading them myself. --cw [1] Say, sine I'm making up arbitray facts and numbers, only 0.01% of Windows installations do some kind of damage or make undesirable or unadvertised changes that require manual intervention or correction, the size of a possible class action suit would be enourmous. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog