Who is Responsible for Spam Control?

Spam control the nemesis of the net: every day I receive about 20 spam messages (junk e-mail) the majority professing to make me rich within 6 months or offering me "sure fire" net stock investments. When I try to remove myself from "whatever" mailing list by placing "remove" in the subject heading 80% of the time I find the return address to be bogus. The local ISP can remove "spam" mail before it goes into individual mail boxes. Procmail a "spam filter" is a software program that can detect a specific piece of mail and attach a warning message, if the mail is suspected of hosting a virus (i.e. the infamous Melissa virus was caught by those ISP who had installed the above software) to it. In Canada, Internet Direct a large national ISP, has launched a successful suit against junk e-mailer Cory Altelaar who was using their server as a platform for launching junk mail. The court granted an injunction preventing Cory Altelaar from delivering junk e-mail or spam. Internet Direct was awarded reimbursement of its legal costs.

In Britain an ISP (Demon) was successfully sued by a physicist named Laurence Godfrey for carrying libelous messages about him on a Usenet news group soc.culture.thai in 1997. The original message was posted by someone in the US and carried in the above news group on the Demon server. Godfey's lawyer sent a fax to Demon asking them to remove the posting from their news group. Demon admitted they had received the fax but didn't remove the message as they (Demon) weren't responsible for the original publication of the message but simply carried it on the news group. Demon argued that a postal company or telephone company can't be held responsible for people making insulting phone calls or letters.

In the USA CompuServe was held not responsible for online content "unless" it monitors it (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work on line: by observing the situation, you change it). This could mean that your ISP is liable if their mail filtering system lets material that some find offensive through, stops a piece of mail and kills a legitimate message, or lets a piece of mail through that has a virus or Trojan Horse and damages the recipients files. The CompuServe court decision didn't address automatic spam filtering but only human moderation of forums. It is unclear as to the ISP ultimate responsibility, if they are notified of material that is offensive to someone but not others do they remove it? An ISP may have to make a judgment as to whether the message was libelous or not - not a comfortable or practical situation