Franse provider etcetera

[Hein Westerouen van Meeteren]

Sorrie voor de lange tekst, maar dit stuk zal enkelen van u zeker
interesseren. Het gaat over die Franse provider die kapotgeprocedeerd is.
De democratie is een issue.

Hier komt ie:

Court

ACCESS AND ANONYMITY SEVERELY PUNISHED BY FRENCH COURT
by Andy Oram
American Reporter Correspondent
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- Like the biblical Jacob, modern
governments are wrestling with anonymity. Jacob's adversary (described
in the scripture merely as a "man") gives him both a wound and a
blessing. When Jacob begs, "Tell me your name!" the man retorts, "Why
do you ask my name?" and departs. Four thousand years later, we still
find in anonymity elements both harmful and liberating.
On February 10, an anonymous Web publication brought down a
popular benefactor in France. Valentin Lacambre, who made a living
registering and managing domain names, had set up a server called
Altern that offered free Web sites. Over 47,000 people took advantage
of his offer, submitting every imaginable sort of political, cultural,
and other content.
Naturally, a few illegal fish swam into this bouillabaisse,
but Lacambre tried to act responsibly in ridding his server of
them. "The police come regularly to ask me for information," he told a
ZDNet reporter, "and I give it to them."
Nobody really knows why this delicate balance failed to
protect Altern and Lacambre last year when the famous model Estelle
Hallyday sued him for violations of privacy. Nineteen photos of her in
a state of undress -- popular material that people have reported
seeing elsewhere -- were found on one of the Web sites on his server.
In France, as in the United States, courts have ruled fairly
consistently that access providers should not be held responsible for
content placed on their servers by other people. It was the supposed
anonymity of the Web site that stripped Lacambre bare of this
protection.
On June 9, 1998, according to Meryem Marzouki of
civil-liberties group IRIS, a court ordered Lacambre to remove the
Hallyday photos but stopped short of making any judgment about his
liability. The court did set a dangerous precedent, though, by forcing
him "to put in place means that would render impossible any diffusion
of the photographic images." In other words, as Marzouki says, he
would have "to check each day, each hour, each minute, all his 40,000
hosted web sites, looking for Estelle Hallyday photographs."
Lacambre appealed the decision on the basis that the guarantee
was impossible to achieve. On February 10, a court found that he could
be held responsible for the violation of privacy because the Web site
was anonymous.
Certainly the Web site with photos was unlabeled. But as I've
explained, it was far from anonymous in the sense that Lacambre could
have revealed the pornographer's identity at any time. Neither
Hallyday nor the courts asked him to,
How does one attain anonymity? You can use an "anonymizer"
service that strips away identifying information from electronic mail,
but no posting you make to a mailing newsgroup in that manner has the
permanence of a Web site. Most anonymizers keep information on your
true origin anyway, so that replies can be directed back to you.
Some computers on the Internet have poor enough security for
individuals to connect freely and send electronic mail without
revealing their actual location. But because "spammers" (senders of
unsolicited bulk email) search out and exploit these sites heavily,
their administrators frequently are told of the problem and tighten
their access.
Is a truly anonymous Web site possible in the same fashion as
an electronic mail message? In theory, but not in practice.
To allow people to hide their locations, a system
administrator would have to create a world-writable directory (meaning

anybody can put data there) and allow anonymous connections (as many
FTP sites do already). So long as the system administrator refused to
log connections, no trace would remain of who uploaded files.
But the result would be that people would overwrite files they
didn't like, and that some who disapprove of anonymous services would
immediately and repeatedly fill the server's disk with garbage. No,
anonymous sites are not practicable. It is not possible on the Web to
wrench the socket of someone's thigh and just walk away.
Lacambre's case has been publicized by IRIS, APRIL
(Association for the Promotion and Research of Free Information), and
many other political and cultural supporters, winning him a great deal
of political sympathy and even pledges of financial aid. An impressive
198 organizations -- let alone individuals -- have signed an online an
online IRIS petition, and another 12,000 a simple petition saying
"Altern.org should be able to continue managing free Internet sites."
For many of these activists, including IRIS and APRIL, the key issues
are freedom of expression and the survival of a "non-commercial
Internet."
Anonymity on the Web, which has many social benefits, is first
to go under this court ruling. No one has defended anyone's right to
display nude photographs of a famous person. But whistle-blowers and
protesters against political repression, who can hand out leaflets
anonymously on the street, should have the right to make use of the
immensely more powerful online medium.
After anonymity, the next Internet institution threatened by
the court decision is free Web service, or even a public Web service
of any sort. How can a provider ensure that thousands of clients
identify themselves clearly on every Web page? The degree of
surveillance required by the court decision makes the framers of the
Communications Decency Act look like Jean-Jacques Rousseau by
comparison. And indeed, Lacambre has provisionally removed his 47,000
sites rather than subject himself to the requirement that each site be
checked continually.
In the United States, where the fear of copyright infringement
rivals the fear of pornography in driving debate over the liability of
Internet providers, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has
erected an acceptable compromise in rights and responsibilities. A
tangle of rules protect universities, service providers, and other
sites offering Internet services to clients from liability for those
clients' copyright infringement. In return, the service provider has
to register with the Copyright Office so that a copyright holder
complaining of infringement can easily make contact.
I do not necessarily offer the Copyright Act as a model for a
French solution, but the ruling of February 10 shows that something
needs to be done there to restore an open Internet. It is ironic that
the ruling cites a "violation of privacy" in order to squelch one of
the most valuable sources of privacy, the ability to express oneself
anonymously on the Web.
On a mailing list in support of Lacambre, many protesters
point to another irony: that a French court delivered a blow against
the promulgation of Internet access during French preparations for a
"Festival of the Internet" to take place from March 19 through
21. Punning on the French for "Festival of the Internet" (Fete de
l'Internet), a site called Mini Rezo lamented attacks on Lacambre and
another Internet site in an article called "Defeat of the Internet."
The article traces the ruling to a mentality that "considers the
liberty of expression dangerous...the widely circulated myth that this
liberty is totally uncontrollable and left to criminal elements."
The circumstances of the ruling have led many political
observers to deduce that it was politically motivated. They point to
the omission of the natural and basic step of asking Lacambre to
remove the material or identify its owner, to the staggering
restitution demanded -- 400,000 Francs, typical for a case against a
tabloid newspaper but not a small entrepreneur earning 10,000 Francs a
year -- and to distortions of fact in the ruling. For intance, the
court insisted that Lacambre profited from his Web sites, even though
he was offering them for free and never required advertising or any
other revenue-generating compensation.
Activist Christine Treguier lays out the political battle as
follows: "Now that France has released cryptography and big business
can start up, they (the authorities, the multinationals, the private
businesses) want to clean the yard. Move away, you dirty, chaotic
internauts."
There are plenty of precedents for digging up publishing
infractions as a weapon of political censorship. In France, we can go
back to the 1857 in the Second Empire, and the trial against the
liberal journal La Revue de Paris.
A government prosecutor snared the journal for serializing a
novel that was "an outrage to the public and religious morals." But
most observers knew that the journal's real crime was to publish
leftist opponents of the regime. The Revue had already received two
warnings for this, and was to be shut down the permanently following
year on the charge that it encouraged sedition.
The morality trial proved to be simple buffoonery, ending with
all defendents acquitted. It succeeded only in drawing the public's
attention to the daring views in the novel being condemned -- Madame
Bovery -- and the talents of author Gustav Flaubert, who conducted a
tiresomly conventional lifestyle.
While I doubt that any of the 47,000 site on Altern contained
work of the quality of Madame Bovary, I would like the chance to
explore what these earnest souls have to offer and I wish that
Lacambre had been vindicated like Flaubert. Limits are acceptable on
the absolute concealment of identity, but the infractions of a few
should not be grounds for denying the rights of all to free and even
anonymous expression.


Andy Oram is moderator of the Cyber Rights mailing list for
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and an
editor at O'Reilly & Associates.


Hein  van Meeteren
 Amsterdam
heinwvm at palm.a2000.nl