David Shabazz has a posting with lots of information about liability issues. The discussion of the early liability cases is like a short history of the Internet. The way Compuserv was found not liable for distributing the messages of its users while Prodigy was based on its editing of the content. The early idea seemed to be, kill the messenger, don’t destroy the road on which the messenger has traveled. It seems like the later solutions as in the Internet Telecommunications Act take a more balanced approach.
I can see the need for internet service providers to have the ability to edit or remove messages. There could be any number of reasons for needing to do this. They should not necessarily be liable because they try to clean thing up. In all, this is still a bit murky for me. Maybe that is how it should be—each of these cases probably calls for tighter scrutiny and will be decided on its own merits, I suppose.
