If something appears on a bulletin board that is illegal, libellous or offensive who carries the can — the bulletin board operator or the person who uploads the information?
No argument, says Compunet (the new dial-up database for Commodore 64 users), it is the person who uploads the information. And that could be you.
Compunet has scored over its rival Micronet by running an area on the database called the Jungle. For a charge of 1p a day per page, you can upload anything you like to be read by any other user. “If we find anything that is illegal or offensive we would, of course, take it off,” said John Clarke, Compunet’s commercial manager. “But we can’t exercise any editorial control over what people choose to put up.”
To get itself off the hook in any legal actions, it has written into the terms and conditions of usage a requirement that users accept legal responsibility for anything they upload. Mr. Clarke said that the clause had been inserted after taking legal advice from its solicitors and Compunet is confident that this will protect it from anyone wanting to sue. But the company admits that the legal position is still unclear. “The advice from our solicitors is that this is such a new area that there are no legal precedents to follow,” said Mr. Clarke.
In conventional publishing material is checked before it goes into a magazine or newspaper. With electronic publishing, the material is loaded directly into the database by the user without the publisher seeing it first.
The question of legal responsibility is one that is not only worrying Compunet. Operators of bulletin boards in this country are anxiously following a legal action currently going through the courts in the US.
In Los Angeles a bulletin board operator had all his equipment seized after a caller had left a list of telephone credit card numbers on a public area of the board. The equipment was subsequently returned but the operator is now being taken to court.
Compunet has already signed up its first information provider. National Property Link is running a nationwide property information service for estate agents. For £1,200 or £40 a month, an estate agent gets a Commodore 64; two disk drives, monitor, printer and modem. The software included allows access to Compunet and the ability to operate a local property-matching service. Details on many of the properties available can be accessed by other Compunet users.