>From: Penn Jennings <jennings@cyberca.com>
>Date: Thu, 02 Jan 1997 01:34:21 -0500
>At 11:18 PM 1/1/97 -0600, Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.chinet.com> wrote:
>>The list manager has no responsibilities whatsoever for stopping the exchange
>>of rude e-mail messages between 2 list members. He should not get in the
>>middle, nor assume that he is capable of changing anyone's behavior. He
>>certainly should not take it upon himself to examine the contents of the
>>messages to decide whether or not there is harassment.
[your hypothetical example of a series of threats and a murder]
>NEGLIGENCE involves carelessness that injures another person. There are 4
>parts to Negligence:
> 1. Duty.
> 2. Breaking a standard of care.
> 3. Proximate Cause
> 4. Damages.
>1. As a list manager you DO HAVE duties and responsibilities.
Sure, the duties of a responsible list manager. But, you are not a policeman
nor a psychiatrist and you do not provide private security to your members. You
are in no position to judge the seriousness of the threat.
I suggest that you expose yourself to even greater liability if you hold
yourself out to be a predictor of human behavior, or claim to be able to
control the actions of your list members.
You have no responsibilities in this matter. All you can do is to advise the
recipient of the threats to make a police complaint or seek a restraining
order. If the police or some other expert asks you to remove the threat maker,
do it. But, don't just do it on your own; it could provoke him.
>2. The standard of care is based on what the ordinary, reasonable and prudent
>person would do. Such a person WOULD take some action against a user in the
>light of multiple complaints from multiple people about the same person.
A prudent person does not claim to be an expert in human behavior. In a
situation this serious, a responsible person would seek expert advice.
>3. Clearly, if you had kicked the vile user off when the problems first
>occurred the murder would not have occurred.
This is not logical. This person was not under your control.
>If you had informed the new user was threating the kill poeple he/she may not
>have joined the list.
Not only that, a potential list member might conclude that the list manager
himself was dangerous, as he runs a list that attracts psychopaths.
>4. The dead person was obviously damaged.
But, not by the list manager.
>I would assume that Prodigy had as good attorney as you could get and a court
>stated that list manager ARE responsible for some actions. Why are you not?
It wasn't done on the list! You cannot claim to provide security to your list
members, nor that you are an expert in violent behavior. If you know of
criminal acts, you are obligated to report it. But, you didn't receive the
threat, the list member did. The obligation is on that person to make the
complaint. Use of e-mail to make threats is a criminal offense.
Now, if the list member refused to cooperate with the police, what exactly
could you do? You didn't receive the message; you have no evidence of a crime.
>I'm not an attorney but I will share this with you. My day job is with a 30
>Billion dollar corporation at which I am one of the Webmaster. The legal
>department demanded that we NOT receive email to the Webmaster account. Their
>reason was basically this "Once you are notified of certain types of events
>you have a legal and moral obligation to take action." They did not want a
>Webmaster responsible for a 30 billion corporation loosing a multimillion
>dollar law suit.
Gee, you didn't know that you were the gatekeeper when you agreed to maintain
the Web pages? How did your corporate attorney decide that you would be
completely irresponsible with your e-mail messages? I trust that a responsible
employee of your company who received an allegation of a product defect would
notify someone responsible at your company.
Do your attorneys require that all incoming mail is shredded in case of
allegations?
Your attorney is merely covering his own ass by giving you a worst-case
scenario. It's not necessarily good advice, which is what you are paying him
for. Don't read into it any more than that.
References:
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