On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 3:40 PM, BOB wrote: > The people who Have a thing like google have a > responsibility's to Police their content. Do the executives of a telephone company get in trouble when someone uses their phone to transfer illegal material? There is the concept of a "common carrier" that does not police or discriminate on content. Different countries have different laws concerning this, but last time I checked cell phone company executives weren't getting put in jail because their customers are taking illegal pictures and broadcasting them to their friend's cell phones. Whether an online video service (or a web host of any sort) has an obligation to pro-actively police material or not is the key point here. However, if we force all online services to view each video and determine whether it's legal or not, then who is going to pay all the lawyers to waht millions of hours of video per month? It would significantly cripple the service which on top of all that is _free_. Further, the person that was affected received an apology from Google and withdrew from the lawsuit. The people who continued it were the state's prosecuter and an organization who's name was uttered derogatorily in the video. The only solution, of course, is to block all public websites from Italy except for those hosting companies that promise to actively police ALL content posted on ALL websites, video, text, or otherwise. Keep in mind that this has extraordinarily far-reaching implications. It's not just video hosting websites, but all websites with any content whatsoever. If Italy's laws really do require this, then a lot more people are very exposed to jail time. Even though the executive's sentences are automatically suspended, there's doubtless hundreds of videos on there that could possibly be breaking the law as well, so the next time it happens they will be put in jail (or sentenced in absentia and then we get into a big mess with extradition agreements). Yes, it's terrible that this abuse happened, and that it continued online in the form of repeat viewings, but Google is barely a third party to the abuse. Why weren't the cell phone executives whose phone took the video named? What about the ISP used to transfer the video to Google? What about the hundreds of ISPs that let their users view the video? What about the thousands of ISPs that own routers between Google and the other ISPs? What about the companies that own the lines running between the ISPs? -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist