To follow up a bit, the judges in the ruling made very clear
that they thought the law's original wording was in dire
need of an update to deal with modern realities. On NANOG,
there has been discussion of how router caches might
be interpreted under this reading of the law, so this
problem is not particular to OPES. There seems to be a
fairly general recognition that this was not the intended
scope of the law.
Efforts to help get those laws updated are not in scope
for this group, though, and I encourage those interested
to seek appropriate fora for the purpose.
regards,
Ted Hardie
At 10:28 AM -0600 7/6/04, The Purple Streak, Hilarie Orman wrote:
The Boston ruling about email might apply to http caches
(non-transparent ones) and possibly OPES processors acting on behalf
of the recipient. I don't think it has much to do with protocols, but
it has a lot to do with storing message copies.
The article implies that if the content is stored as a service to the
user, then it is not protected under wiretap law. It sounds as though
the SMTP store-and-forward phase is still protected until it hits the
ISP that is acting on behalf of the recipient. At that point any
message copies are assumed to be a storage service for the recipient.
But, I'm not a lawyer and have based my opinion entirely on the
article, and that article is written by someone who is neither a
lawyer nor an Internet expert.
Hilarie