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Berlin

A BILL being debated in the German parliament could rescue an executive
of CompuServe, the world’s second largest Internet service provider, from
criminal charges for allowing pornography and Nazi imagery to pass over his
company’s computers.

Last month, Munich’s chief prosecutor filed charges against Felix Somm, head
of CompuServe in Germany. They allege that by providing access to Internet
newsgroups dealing with child pornography and computer games in which swastikas
are displayed Somm broke Germany’s tough censorship laws. Experts on Internet
law say the case is unprecedented. But they are hailing the bill that could
rescue Somm as a model for other governments as they struggle to decide how to
regulate the Net.

The new law would place limits on the extent to which online service
providers are responsible for the material that their subscribers can access. It
says that an Internet provider cannot be held responsible for information that
is not held on its computers, such as World Wide Web pages maintained by other
organisations. Even when illegal material is stored on a provider’s computers,
as is the case for Internet newsgroups, the company could only be prosecuted if
it had been informed about the offending material, and if it was possible to
block access to the material with a “reasonable” amount of effort.

Hans-Werner Moritz, Somm’s lawyer, argues that the law “clearly will lead to
the dropping of charges” against his client. Somm’s defence is that the
offending material is actually stored on computers at CompuServe’s headquarters
in Ohio, to which CompuServe Germany merely provides an automatic gateway.
CompuServe ran into similar legal problems in Germany in 1995, but abandoned
attempts to block the offending newsgroups because it could not do so without
censoring access for subscribers worldwide. Manfred Wick, the Munich prosecutor,
declined to comment on the impact of the new law on Somm’s case when contacted
by New ¾«¶«´«Ã½.

Introducing the latest draft of the new law in the German parliament last
month, science and technology minister Jürgen Rüttgers cited remarks
from Somm, praising the draft for “finally creating clarity with regard to who
is responsible for content on the Internet”.

The proposed change in the law has also been welcomed by a coalition of
Internet providers and civil liberties groups who last week delivered a letter
of protest about Somm’s treatment to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. They said
that the charges against Somm create a “harmful precedent”, but praised the
bill, saying it would “do much to ensure the protection of personal
freedoms”.

Privacy advocates in other countries have also come out in favour of the law.
As well as clarifying the extent to which Internet providers are responsible for
material on the Net, it would ban providers from collecting data on the browsing
habits of their subscribers. Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center in Washington DC adds that he is “particularly enthusiastic”
about a section that would require online service providers to set up anonymous
payment schemes. This would allow users to keep their identities secret if they
wished.