Computer Dealer News: Victory for Internet Service Providers: ISPs were on the brink of increasing c

In June, the Supreme Court of Canada decided Internet service providers are not responsible for the way their customers use their services.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This was hailed as a victory for ISPs, and so it is. It's also a victory for consumers and for common sense.

The immediate issue was music downloading. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) had asked for a percentage of ISPs' revenues to be taken from them and handed to music copyright holders as payment for music downloaded over the Internet.

Had this succeeded, ISPs would presumably have passed the cost on to consumers. I know quite a few people who never download music, and you can argue that they shouldn't be paying for those who do. Still, the world is full of such bits of unfairness, and we live with it. That's not the main point. Making ISPs responsible for the content they carry would have broader implications for ISPs and for consumers.

Doing so would suggest that ISPs can and should control the content they carry. Once you accept that principle, they can be held responsible for stopping spam, illegal online gambling, access to child pornography and hate literature, all manner of copyright violations, and whatever miscellaneous conspiracies the authorities might decide to get excited about.

To do those things, ISPs would have to restrict and/or monitor their customers' activities. This would turn them into police and censors. They aren't qualified to do those jobs. Child pornography and hate literature are bad things, but so are intolerance and censorship, and if we're going to put limits on what people can look at or say online, those limits need to be defined carefully, by the courts, not by ISPs.

Faced with a responsibility to block such material, ISPs would probably turn to technological solutions--software designed to block access to objectionable material. Such software, while it may be an acceptable way to keep children away from porn, is prone to blocking material it shouldn't, based both on side effects of the blocking rules and--in some cases--on the politics and prejudices of the software vendors.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Are ISPs responsible for spam? It's good business to do what they can to protect their customers from it, but they can only do so much, and if they try too hard there's a risk they'll block legitimate e-mail their customers want to receive or have a right to send. In fact this sometimes happens today.

Are ISPs responsible for music downloading? No more than the phone company is responsible for obscene and harassing phone calls or a car dealer is responsible for drunken driving. They provide a tool; they can't be expected to control what their customers do with it, and asking them to do so is a bad idea.

Musicians, like everyone else, should be able to earn a fair living from their work.

How much of the furor over music downloading really is about musicians' incomes, as opposed to recording-industry profits, is an interesting question, but let that go. The fact that someone feels shortchanged doesn't give him or her the right to pick the nearest pocket. And we need to be very careful who we make responsible for telling us what we can and can't do--there are arguably too many people telling us that already.