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> As it stands, if they really want to do this, I hope they realize it makes them de facto responsible for all email that goes through their service (and if the

> As it stands, if they really want to do this, I hope they realize it makes them de facto responsible for all email that goes through their service (and if they don't, then they are even bigger idiots than I normally paint them to be, as they literally are involved in a similar case in court right now). This argument is based on a long-outdated understanding of the law. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act extends immunity even to services exercising editorial control over content. See Zeran v. AOL: "Congress' clear objective in passing §230 of the CDA was to encourage the development of technologies, procedures and techniques by which objectionable material could be blocked or deleted."[5] Since distributor liability would have the effect of disincentivizing the filtering of content by third parties, the court found that such laws were in conflict with the "purpose and objectives of congress," and were thus preempted.

deleted 9y ago
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saurik 9y ago
There is a difference between "responsibility" in the form "you are now liable for the damages caused by the other party" (which is what you are looking at, I think?) and "people can come to you and demand you take down more content and you will end up in a position where they can force you to do that with injunctions" (which is what I am looking at). I should verify, though, if your point here is partially that this would be different from ALS Scan v Cloudflare, as the latter involves "infrastructure level caching"? That said, in the case of AOL, the content wasn't just cached: it was being hosted. Is it that one was an awkward case of defamation and this one is more about copyright? But then I would say that Section 230 has severe limitations. I guess let's look at this from another direction: why do you feel Section 230 is a protection that is relevant here but isn't helping Cloudflare on their other fronts? It would seem to me that the actual issue of concern (that Cloudflare can and likely will be asked to block DNS for domain names that happen to host or advertise things like The Pirate Bay) is not affected by the existence of Section 230.

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saurik 9y ago

There is a difference between "responsibility" in the form "you are now liable for the damages caused by the other party" (which is what you are looking at, I think?) and "people can come to you and demand you take down more content and you will end up in a position where they can force you to do that with injunctions" (which is what I am looking at). I should verify, though, if your point here is partially that this would be different from ALS Scan v Cloudflare, as the latter involves "infrastructure level caching"? That said, in the case of AOL, the content wasn't just cached: it was being hosted. Is it that one was an awkward case of defamation and this one is more about copyright? But then I would say that Section 230 has severe limitations. I guess let's look at this from another direction: why do you feel Section 230 is a protection that is relevant here but isn't helping Cloudflare on their other fronts? It would seem to me that the actual issue of concern (that Cloudflare can and likely will be asked to block DNS for domain names that happen to host or advertise things like The Pirate Bay) is not affected by the existence of Section 230.