Responding to msg by nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) on Wed, 10 Jan 1:43 PM
Last summer the first case in Britain of a libel on the Internet was settled out of court when Laurence Godfrey accepted undisclosed damages from another nuclear physicist, Philip Hallam-Baker, over remarks made in 1993 on Usenet, an electronic conference with 16 million users. And Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, sent a stiff letter to the vice-chancellor of Leeds University after one of its students used a faculty computer to make defamatory allegations about him.
---------- The NYT reports that by 2000 there will be over 1 million lawyers in the US. These fine-minders, supported by the burgeoning private investigative and security fields, will surely mine electronic archives as thoroughly as they research paper -- and thanks to wondrous Altavistas maybe more thoroughly. And backed by these highly skilled lobbyists, laws will change to make remunerative rain of -- and by -- archiving and search technology as they have to capitalize on the technology of doing the same in the worlds of printing, telegraph, telephone and television. Promotion of these privacy-invasive services on the Net parallels the defensive measures explored on cypherpunks. Perhaps all c'punks should subscribe to cyberia-l and vice versa; they are hand in hand, or fist to fist, on this.