Computer underground Digest Sun July 13, 1997 Volume 9 : Issue 56 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, #9.56 (Sun, July 13, 1997) File 1--Cyber Patrol Bans Crpyt Newsletter File 2--ALA Council Resolution on the Use of Filtering Software File 3--An Economic Basis for SPAM Control File 4--French "English Only" Web Site Suit Dismissed File 5--UFOs and the Net (fwd Islands in the Clickstream) File 6--Oil City Officials Worry About Link To Web Page File 7--Call for Commentaries on CuD Special Issue of Net & Education File 8--Star Wars, Fanfiction, and Big Eight Newsgroup Creation File 9--Anti-solicitation laws and anti-spam "opt-in" mailing lists File 10--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: 20 Jun 97 01:53:31 EDT From: "George Smith [CRYPTN]" <70743.1711@CompuServe.COM> Subject: File 1--Cyber Patrol Bans Crpyt Newsletter ((CuD MODERATORS' COMMENT: George Smith learned the danger of blocking software. As he explains, the homepage of Crypt Newsletter was blocked. Why? Because another homepage on the server, the American Society of Criminology's Critical Criminology Division homepage at http://www.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim, includes a copy of the Unabomer Manifesto. The Crit Crim page is a well-established and busy resource, especially for criminologists, and the Unabomer Manifesto is relevant to the research resources the page provides. Unfortunately, all homepages on the system beginning with ~cr were blocked. Although the problem apparently has been resolved for now, risks of future blocking remain. Because libraries and schools use Cyber Patrol, the consequence of the blocking may be to exclude students from the ability to access a valuable homepage for assigments)). Banned by Cyber Patrol June 19, 1997 Hey, buddy, did you know I'm a militant extremist? Cyber Patrol, the Net filtering software designed to protect your children from cyberfilth, says so. Toss me in with those who sleep with a copy of "The Turner Diaries" under their pillows and those who file nuisance liens against officials of the IRS. Seems my Web site is dangerous viewing. I discovered I was a putative militant extremist while reading a story on Net censorship posted on Bennett Haselton's PeaceFire Web site. Haselton is strongly critical of Net filtering software and he's had his share of dustups with vendors like Cyber Patrol, who intermittently ban his site for having the temerity to be a naysayer. Haselton's page included some links so readers could determine what other Web pages were banned by various Net filters. On a lark, I typed in the URL of the Crypt Newsletter, the publication I edit. Much to my surprise, I had been banned by Cyber Patrol. The charge? Militant extremism. Cyber Patrol also has its own facility for checking if a site is banned, called the CyberNOT list. Just to be sure, I double-checked. Sure enough, I was a CyberNOT. Now you can call me Ray or you can call me Joe, but don't ever call me a militant extremist! I've never even seen one black helicopter transporting U.N. troops to annex a national park. However, nothing is ever quite as it seems on the Web and before I went into high dudgeon over political censorship--the Crypt Newsletter has been accused of being "leftist" for exposing various government, academic, and software industry charlatans--I told some of my readership. Some of them wrote polite--well, almost polite--letters to Debra Greaves, Cyber Patrol's head of Internet research. And Greaves wrote back almost immediately, indicating it had all been a mistake. My Web site was blocked as a byproduct of a ban on another page on the same server. "We do have a [blocked] site off of that server with a similar directory. I have modified the site on our list to be more unique so as to not affect [your site] any longer," she wrote. Perhaps I should have been reassured that Cyber Patrol wasn't banning sites for simply ridiculing authority figures, a favorite American past time. But if anything, I was even more astonished to discover th company's scattershot approach to blocking. It doesn't include precise URLs in its database. Instead, it prefers incomplete addresses that block everything near the offending page. The one that struck down Crypt News was "soci.niu.edu/~cr," a truncated version of my complete URL. In other words: any page on the machine that fell under "~cr" was toast. Jim Thomas, a sociology professor at Northern Illinois University, runs this particular server, and it was hard to imagine what would be militantly extreme on it. Nevertheless, I ran the news by Thomas. It turns out that the official home page of the American Society of Criminology's Critical Criminology Division, an academic resource, was the target. It features articles from a scholarly criminology journal and has the hubris to be on record as opposing the death penalty but didn't appear to have anything that would link it with bomb-throwing anarchists, pedophiles, and pornographers. There was, however, a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto on the page. I told Thomas I was willing to bet $1,000 cash money that Ted Kaczynski's rant was at the root of Cyber Patrol's block. Thomas confirmed it, but I can't tell you his exact words. It might get this page blocked, too. What this boils down to is that Cyber Patrol is banning writing on the Web that's been previously published in a daily newspaper: The Washington Post. It can also be said the Unabomber Manifesto already has been delivered to every corner of American society. If the ludicrous quality of this situation isn't glaring enough, consider that one of Cyber Patrol's partners, CompuServe, promoted the acquisition of electronic copies of the Unabomber Manifesto after it published by the Post. And these copies weren't subject to any restrictions that would hinder children from reading them. In fact, I've never met anyone from middle-class America who said, "Darn those irresponsible fiends at the Post! Now my children will be inspired to retreat to the woods, write cryptic essays attacking techno-society, and send exploding parcels to complete strangers." Have you? So, will somebody explain to me how banning the Unabomber Manifesto, the ASC's Critical Criminology home page, and Crypt Newsletter protects children from smut and indecency? That's a rhetorical question. Cyber Patrol is strongly marketed to public libraries, and has been acquired by some, in the name of protecting children from Net depravity. Funny, I thought a public library would be one of the places you'd be more likely to find a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto. _George Smith is the author of The Virus Creation Labs, a book about computer virus writers and the antivirus industry._ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 10:28:11 -0800 From: "--Todd Lappin-->" Subject: File 2--ALA Council Resolution on the Use of Filtering Software Source - fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu From: "Craig A. Johnson" AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION This resolution was adopted by ALA Council at the annual conference. RESOLUTION ON THE USE OF FILTERING SOFTWARE IN LIBRARIES WHEREAS, On June 23, 1997, the United States Supreme court issued a sweeping re-affirmation of core First Amendment principles and held that communications over the Internet deserve the highest level of Constitutional protection; and WHEREAS, The Court's most fundamental holding is that communications on the Internet deserve the same level of Constitional protection as books, magazines, newspapers, and speakers on a street corner soapbox. The Court found that the *Internet constitutes a vast platfrom from which to address and hear from a world-wide audience of millions of readers, viewers, researchers, and buyers,* and that *any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox*; and WHEREAS, For libraries, the most critical holding of the Supreme Court is that libraries that make content available on the Internet can continue to do so with the same Constitutional protections tha apply to the books on libraries' shelves; and WHEREAS, The Court's conclusion *that the vast democratic fora of the Internet* merit full constitutional protection will also serve to protect libraries that provide their patrons with access to the Internet; and WHEREAS, The Court recognized the importance of enabling individuals to receive speech from the entire world and to speak to the entire world. Libraries provide these opportunities to many who would not otherwise have them; and WHEREAS, The Supreme Court's decision will protect that access; and WHEREAS, The use in libraries of software filters which block Constitutionally protected speech is inconsistent with the United States Constitution and federal law and may lead to legal exposure for the library and its governing authorities; now, therefore, be it RESOLVED, That the American Library Association affirms that the use of filtering software by libaries to block access to constitutionally protected speech violates the Library Bill of Rights. Adopted by the ALA Council, July 2, 1997 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 09 Jul 97 09:59:10 EST From: Computer Privacy Digest Moderator Subject: File 3--An Economic Basis for SPAM Control ((SOURCE - Computer Privacy Digest, Vol 11, #002:, Wed 8 July: The Computer Privacy Digest is a forum for discussion on the effect of technology on privacy or vice versa. The digest is moderated and gatewayed into the USENET newsgroup comp.society.privacy (Moderated). Submissions should be sent to comp-privacy@uwm.edu and administrative requests to comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu. Web browsers will find it at http://www.uwm.edu/org/comp-privacy/)) ========= From--Steve Schear Date--02 Jul 1997 18:02:07 -0700 Subject--An Economic Basis for SPAM Control There are three approaches being publicly discussed to regulate unwanted email: regulatory, opt-in and opt-out. Due to subtle, but important differences between fax and email, I believe the legal approach will be difficult to craft without facing First Amendment challenges. Both the opt-in and opt-out appear to create more bureaucratic overhead and may be difficult to satisfactorily administer. There is a fourth approach, economic, which has received scant attention. Postage costs are what, quite effectively, keep our snail-mail boxes from overflowing with junk. Since email is essentially free, or almost, there has been no incentive for SPAMers to better target their ads, as is financially required for snail-mail advertising. One economic approach is to enhance email software (either at the ISP or client end) that would filter incoming messages in two ways: to determine if the sender was known to the recipient (i.e., from previous correspondence) or to determine if sufficient postage was placed within the message header. The email software could automate building the 'known sender' list from email responses and other user input (in this way electronic mailing lists would should not be affected). Messages not from known parties and without sufficient postage would be rejected: returned to sender or discarded. The email software could refund postage--e.g., by explicit recipient action or in the next reply email--so non-SPAM senders would not be left out-of-pocket for d-postage. SPAMers would have their d-postage pocketed by the recipient. There are at least two Digital Postage (d-postage) approaches: e-cash based d-postage and sender-generated d-postage (hashcash). E-cash based postage is an obvious choice. Like today's postal stamps, the sender would need to purchase the e-cash and include it in the header of outgoing mail to recipients to whom the sender was unknown. However, e-cash isn't widely used nor is it certain that current and proposed e-cash systems could economically and architecturally scale to address Net d-postage. An alternative is to use 'stamps' created by the sender. Called 'hashcash,' it was first put forward as a way to reduce remailer abuse. With hascash the sender must perform a mathematical operation which is very computationally intensive when generating the 'stamp' (the more complex the higher the stamp value) but which is quick for the recipient to check. Each stamp value is intimately related to the recipient's address, so a SPAMer can't reproduce a stamp and send them to different addressees. Hashcash is elegant in its simplicity and scalability due to its lack of a centralized issuing or clearing facility. Hascash-based d-postage could also seed the development of commercial distributed computing Net industry, as SPAMers elect to purchase hashcash rather than generating it themselves-the idea isn't to eliminate SPAM, just place it on similar economic footing with junk snailmail. (See http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/). ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, June 10, 1997 From: user45@@anonymous.nosys.com Subject: File 4--French "English Only" Web Site Suit Dismissed Source: Reuters. Dateline: PARIS FRENCH INTERNET SUIT DISMISSED ENGLISH-ONLY WEB SITE ILLEGAL, GROUPS CHARGE The first test of whether France's disputed language law applies to the Internet ended in a fiasco Monday when a court threw out the case against an overseas branch of Georgia Tech on a technicality. Two state-approved watchdogs promoting the use of the French language had filed a complaint against the Georgia Institute of Technology's French campus for using English only on its Web site. The plaintiffs, Defense of the French Language and Future of the French Language, accused Georgia Tech Lorraine of breaking a 1994 law requiring all advertising in France to be in French. The Paris police court dismissed the lawsuit, saying the two private groups should have notified a public prosecutor first. The legislation, named after then-Culture Minister Jacques Toubon, was part of a battle to protect the tongue of Moliere and Racine from the growing international use of English. "The central question, the most interesting one, has not been decided today; only a procedural matter has," said Marc Jobert, lawyer for the two groups, which had demanded that the Internet site be translated into French. While supporters of Internet say the World Wide Web should be free of national restraints, many governments have asserted their authority over cyberspace to try to block pornography or to silence political dissent. "The court did not address the underlying issue and has left us wanting more," said Jacques Schaefer, lawyer for Georgia Tech Lorraine, which is based in Metz, in eastern France. "It's a total victory in the sense that we were cleared of all accusations," he said, but the university would rather have won on substance than on procedure. Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough said the drive to apply the Toubon law to the Web ignores its "interconnected nature." "The Web is the personification of the global economy. It does not recognize national or linguistic borders," he said. Georgia Tech argued at a January hearing that communications on the Web are like telephone calls. It said its Web site is in English because all of its courses are taught in the language and students are required to be fluent in English. Two weeks ago, Georgia Tech Lorraine made its Web site available in French and German as well but denied the lawsuit was the reason. It said that technological advances in the global computer network had made it easier to provide the translation and that it "wanted to be more European." ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 21:37:40 -0500 From: Richard Thieme Subject: File 5--UFOs and the Net (fwd Islands in the Clickstream) Islands in the Clickstream: UFOs and the Internet [This summer marks the 50th anniversaries of the first modern publicized report of UFO phenomena by Kenneth Arnold in June 1947 and the "Roswell incident" in July 1947. This column is much abridged from the articles "How to Build a UFO ... Story" (Internet Underground: November 1996) and "Stalking the UFO Meme on the Internet" (South Africa Computer Magazine: April 1997). The article was also included in Digital Delirium (eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker: St. Martin's Press: 1997). A full copy will be archived on the ThiemeWorks web site -- coming this summer.] "We are convinced that Roswell took place. We've had too many high ranking military officials tell us that it happened, that told us that it was clearly not of this earth." Don Schmitt, co-author, "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell," in an interview on the Internet That "interview with a real X-Filer" can be found on one of the hundreds of web sites -- in addition to Usenet groups, gopher holes stuffed with hundreds of files, and clandestine BBSs where abductees meet to compare "scoop marks" -- that make up the virtual world of flying saucers. The UFO subculture or -- for some -- the UFO religion on the Internet is a huge supermarket of images and words. Everything is for sale -- stories, pictures, entire belief systems. But are we buying a meal? Or a menu? When Schmitt uses the word "Roswell," he is not merely identifying a small town in New Mexico that put itself on the map with a terrific UFO story. He uses it to MEAN the whole story -- the one that says a UFO crashed in 1947 near the Roswell Army Air Field, after which alien bodies were recovered and a cosmic Watergate initiated. That story is scattered on the Internet like fragments of an exploding spaceship. Do the pieces fit together to make a coherent puzzle? Or is something wrong with this picture? Stalking the UFO meme on the Internet Memes are contagious ideas that replicate like viruses from mind to mind. On the Internet memes multiply rapidly. Fed by fascination, incubated in the feverish excitement of devotees transmitting stories of cosmic significance, the UFO meme mutates into new forms, some of them wondrous and strange. "The Roswell incident" is one variation of the UFO meme. On the Internet, Schmitt's words are hyperlinked to those of other UFO sleuths and legions of interested bystanders fascinated by the psychodynamics of the subculture as well as the "data." Before we examine a few fragments, let's pause to remember what the Internet really is. Copies of copies -- or copies of originals? The Internet represents information through symbols or icons. So does speech, writing, and printed text, but the symbols on the Net are even further removed from the events and context to which they point. The power of speech gave us the ability to lie, then writing hid the liar from view. That's why Plato fulminated at writing -- you couldn't know what was true if you didn't have the person right there in front of you. The printing press made it worse. Now digital images and text are on the Net. Pixels can be manipulated. Without correlation with other data, no digital photo or document can be taken at face value. There's no way to know if we're looking at a copy of an original, a copy of a copy, or a copy that has no original. In addition, certain phenomena elicit powerful projections. Because projections are unconscious, we don't know if we're looking at iron filings obscuring a magnet or the magnet. Carl Jung said UFOs invite projections because they're mandalas -- archetypal images of our deep Selves. Unless we separate what he think we see from what we see, we're bound to be confused. Hundreds of cross-referenced links on the Web create a matrix of credibility. In print, we document assertions with references. Footnotes are conspicuous by their absence on the Web. Information is self-referential. Symbols and images point to themselves like a ten-dimensional dog chasing its own tails. Are there "eight firsthand witnesses who saw the bodies," "many high-ranking military officials who said it was not of this earth," or "550 witnesses stating that this was not from this earth?" Schmitt makes all of those statements in the same interview. He uses the word "witness" the way Alice in Wonderland uses words, to mean what she wants them to mean. Tracking down the truth about the "Roswell incident" is like hunting the mythical Snark in the Lewis Carroll poem. The closer one gets to the "evidence," the more it isn't there. There is in fact not one "witness" to the "Roswell incident" in the public domain, not one credible report that is not filtered through a private interview or privileged communication. There are, though, lots of people making a living from it -- makers of the Ray Santilli "autopsy film," guides for tours of the rival crash sites in Roswell, television producers and book publishers. It all gets very confusing. Is any of the confusion intentional? Ready for a Headache? Are government agents using the subculture to manipulate public opinion? To cover up what they know? Are UFO investigators spies, "useful idiots" (as they're known in the spy trade), or just in it for the buck? An online adventure illustrates the difficulty of getting answers. A woman in Hamilton, Montana, was speaking to Peter Davenport, head of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle about a UFO she said was above her house. She said she heard beeps on the radio when it was hovering. As they spoke, some beeps sounded. "There!" she said. "What is that?" I recorded the beeps and posted a message on a hacker's Internet group asking for help. I received an offer of assistance from the LoD, the Legion of Doom, a well-known hacker name. I emailed the beeps as an audio file to them. They examined the switching equipment used by the Montana telco and reported that the signals did not originate within the system. They could say what the signals were not, but not what they were. In another email, a writer said he had heard similar tones over telephone lines and shortwave radio near White Sands Missile Range. He said friends inside the base had given him "some info that would be of great interest. "The documentation and info that I am getting are going to basically confirm what a member of the team has divulged to me [about UFO occupants]. "They are here and they are not benign." Into the Twilight Zone Without corroboration, that's as far as the Internet can take us. Words originate with someone -- but who? Is the name on the email real? Is the account real? Was the White Sands source who he said he was? Were his contacts telling the truth? Or was he a bored kid killing time? The UFO world is a hall of mirrors. The UFO world on the Internet is a simulation of a hall of mirrors. The truth is out there ... but how can we find it? Plato was right. We need to know who is speaking to evaluate the data. The Bottom Line A number of years ago, I volunteered to be Wisconsin state director of the Mutual UFO Network in order to listen firsthand to people who claimed to have encountered UFOs. I brought sixteen years' experience as a counsellor to the project. I listened to people from all walks of life. My interest in the phenomena had quickened in the 1970s during a conversation with a career Air Force officer, a guy with all the "right stuff." A fellow B47 pilot told him of an unusual object that flew in formation with him for a while, then took off at an incredible speed. The co-pilot verified the incident. Neither would report it and risk damage to their careers. That was the first time I heard a story like that from someone I knew well. I remember how he looked as he told that story. Usually confident, even cocky, he looked puzzled, helpless. That was the first time I saw that look, too, but it wouldn't be the last. I have seen that look many times since as credible people -- fighter pilots, commercial air line pilots, intelligence officers, and just plain folk fishing on an isolated lake or walking in the woods after dark -- recounted an experience they can't forget. They don't want publicity. They don't want money. They just want to know what they saw. Data has been accumulating for fifty years. Some is on the Internet. Some is trustworthy. Much of it isn't. Are we hunting a Snark, only to be bamboozled by a boojum? Or are we following luminous breadcrumbs through the forest to the Truth that is Out There? The Net is one place to find answers, but only if our pursuit of the truth is conducted with discipline, a rigorous methodology and absolute integrity. ********************************************************************** Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions of computer technology. Comments are welcome. Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this signature file. If interested in (1) publishing columns online or in print, (2) giving a free subscription as a gift, or (3) distributing Islands to employees or over a network, email for details. To subscribe to Islands in the Clickstream, send email to rthieme@thiemeworks.com with the words "subscribe islands" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, email with "unsubscribe islands" in the body of the message. Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and organizations. Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1997. All rights reserved. ThiemeWorks P. O. Box 17737 Milwaukee WI 53217-0737 414.351.2321 ********************************************************************* ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jul 1997 13:34:47 GMT From: glr@RIPCO.COM(Glen Roberts) Subject: File 6--Oil City Officials Worry About Link To Web Page AP 06-30-97 12:11 PMT AM-PA-BRF--Oil City-Internet,150 Oil City officials worry about link to web page Eds: Note Internet address at end. OIL CITY, Pa. (AP) Officials in this northwestern Pennsylvania city say they do not want to be linked to an Internet site including electronic rants against religions, blacks, women and homosexuals. The ``Outrage'' page is maintained by Glen Roberts, who also posts advertisements for Oil City on his home page in cyberspace. Oil City Mayor Malachy McMahon and other officials are afraid people might think the page reflects the views of city residents. Roberts has a reputation as a spokesman for Internet privacy issues and once posted the Social Security numbers of Indiana University employees to make a point about privacy. He said the opinions on his page are not his own, but rather those of anonymous people who wish to express a viewpoint. ``The whole Internet is based on people being able to say what they want,'' Roberts said. ``It's different than a newspaper, whose letters are filtered through editors and publishers.'' = The Internet address for Roberts' site is: http://www.glr.com/outrage.html. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 97 16:39 CDT From: Cu Digest Subject: File 7--Call for Commentaries on CuD Special Issue of Net & Education Over the past year or two, CuD has received queries about how the Net can be, or is being, used in classrooms, how the "virutal university" concept is being developed, and in general, what's going on at the K-12 and higher education levels. This isn't a topic CuD has addressed in its 8 years of covering cyberculture, but the number of inquiries convinces us that we should make up for this omission. Because CuD has several hundred thousand readers, we assume that a substantive number of them are educators who use the Net. We will start with a special issue in about two or three weeks, and we solicit substantive commentaries (10-35 K) on such issues as: 1) Innovative uses of the Net in classrooms 2) Problems/pitfalls in using the Net in teaching 3) Book reviews of Net-based pedagogy 4) Lists of URLs elated to Net pedagogy 5) Strengths/weaknesses of Virtual Universities 6) Critical essays on whether Net pedagogy is a dilution of education The above are suggestive. Readers will likely have other topics of interest, so feel free to send them over for consideration. Commentaries should be sent to: cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jul 1997 02:48:17 -0700 From: Russ Allbery Subject: File 8--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 23:45:11 +0000 From: David Smith Subject: File 9--Anti-solicitation laws and anti-spam "opt-in" mailing lists Source - fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu One of the tactics advocated by anti-spam activists is that of an "opt-in" mailing list. That is, I can't send you commercial speech via e-mail unless you request the information or we have a prior business relationship. I read the following article in First Amendment Legal Watch (excerpted below) where an anti-solicitation law aimed at real estate brokers was ruled by a district judge as a violation of the First Amendment. I'm not very familiar with anti-solicitation laws. Are there other decisions about statutes that have been upheld or over-turned? ------- Begin Article ------- 3. Anti-Solicitation Law Violates First Amendment A federal district court judge recently struck down an Illinois real-estate anti-solicitation law in a case that has gone on for more than 10 years. The statute prohibited real-estate brokers from soliciting home sales or listings from owners who had provided notice that they did not wish to be solicited. After being fined $100 for calling certain Chicago homeowners who had signed an anti-solicitation petition, a brokerage firm and several brokers challenged the law in federal court. The case has a long and convoluted history. Initially, federal district court Judge Brian Barnett Duff denied the brokerage firm's motion to enjoin the law. During the appeals process, the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent it back down to Judge Duff for reevaluation under a different constitutional standard. In April 1996, the parties had a bench (non-jury) trial which resulted in this recent opinion. Judge Duff ruled the law violated real-estate brokers' free-speech and due-process rights. Analyzing the law under the commercial free-speech doctrine, the Court found that the Illinois attorney general failed to show that the anti-solicitation law "materially and directly advanced" the state's interests in protecting residential privacy and preventing blockbusting-a real-estate practice in which brokers encourage owners to sell their homes by exploiting fears of racial change in the neighborhood. According to the judge, blockbusting is an outdated practice in today's society that could, in any event, be properly punished under other laws. He also found that real-estate solicitation constituted only a small portion of messages residents encounter. For this reason, the judge found that the law restrained too much speech while only marginally protecting privacy concerns. The judge also determined the law violated due process because the law failed to define the term "solicit. " According to the court opinion, a broker could unwittingly violate the law by harmlessly handing out business cards to someone who has signed an anti-solicitation petition. First Amendment Legal Watch Contact Info -- copyright 1997 First Amendment Center To subscribe to the Legal Watch mailing list send an email to legalwatch-join@truman.fac.org To unsubscribe send an email to legalwatch-off@truman.fac.org Legal Watch is available on our Web site (http://www.fac.org) in HTML format and Adobe Acrobat format for printing. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 May 1997 22:51:01 CST From: CuD Moderators Subject: File 10--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997) Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. 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