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Originally Posted by PAZZA
Lets think about newsgroup providers such as giganews etc., they sell access to pirate material, if they could have be prosecuted for supplying such, im sure they already would have been, so I assume they cant be touched, why can they prosecute file sharers, the original napster, but not news providers?
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The answer to this is AIUI from the american perspective as this is where most of the NSP's are: That the NSP's provide a service ie: Usenet access. Nothing more, nothing less. The fact that some content takes up large amounts of space is not of interest to them. They are only concerned about keeping the service running and providing the best service they can provide.
As to the reasons why they haven't been prosecuted, well the truth is they have. But unlike p2p or any of the other types of filesharing, there isn't one particular server to chase down. You make a post to usenet asking a question say, in the same way you would on this forum. It is then immediately sent to thousands of other servers. Some private, others public, some open, some closed. From the moment you press that button, its distributed accross the board to all of them. That message is then imediately available to a large number of people millions or billions is anyones guess. If one of the servers falls over, you can use another. Unlike this forum, which is only available on 2 or 3 servers I imagine.
Not only that, but the one thing you don't mess with in the states is BIG business and these companies make serious money. Some will fight, some will not. But if things come to a head. As US citizens they can fall back on the "freedom of speach", "freedom of information" acts. They are allowed to share information of any type that they like, the files on the servers are just data, it isn't untill they are reconstructed that anything can be made out of them, if anything at all.
As far as most providers are concerned, they are just large essays\rants\raves\discussions\digital photos\shareware\freeware and a whole host of other traffic. They act as carriers for raw data. What's more, they have this acknowledged under one of their laws, so they aren't liable for anything, provided that should something come to their attention that shouldn't be on one of their servers, they remove it. Which they do. So for the most part they are left alone. That is unless you were to post\download anything that relates to adult behaviour towards children. In which case the gloves are off and even the largest of the nsp's will aid the authorities in tracking those that make\use such material available.
As for how the UK deals with usenet. You will need to look up Godfrey vs Demon Internet through google. AFAICT UK isp's are deemed to be carriers as well and act in much the way as the US nsp's do when advised of questionable content by a copyright holder.