"Majdi S. Abbas" wrote:
On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 05:04:05PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
--The service provider must not determine the recipients of the material.
One could argue (in theory) that a routing-table lookup may satisfy this.
I'm not so sure. Generally speaking, a destination network is a given ISP, not a given individual. And it's highly impractical for an ISP to know the /individual/ a packet is destined for from the address.
IANAL, however... Please, the intent of that sentence is to say that the ISP cannot set the destination IP address for the content. The intervening backbones don't do that, they merely copy it to the next hop as the MAC addresses are modified to send it along it's way. The RECIPIENT is DETERMINED (set) by the originator of the communication. There are two hosts which could be argued to participate in this process, and they are at the ends of the conversation. The routers in between do not meet the test.
--The material must be transmitted with no modification to its content.
Same theory here also, where one decrements ttl, since we are talking about ip packets here.
I believe they're referring to copyrighted material which is wholly contained in the payload of the packets involved.
Packet headers are _NOT_ content. the _CONTENT_ is the packet payload, which is _NOT_ modified by the backbone providers.
Either way, this is an interesting test case and I do hope it receives immediate dismissal. This would be like asking the phone company to turn off phone service for people that arrange drug deals or similar. Not something that I see happening.
I have to say I expect this one to be disposed of pretty quickly, but we'll see...
--msa
One would hope, however, I have lost much faith in the US court system as a result of the presidential election and the Napster ruling. Afterall, the Napster ruling amounted to a ruling that a library could be ordered to shut down if a person used the card catalog provided by the library to find a book and then copied said book on the photocopier in the drugstore next door. Owen