comcast blocking smtp25

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   From: John Chambers <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
   Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:35:02 UTC

   It's perhaps worthwhile to note that there's another reason that
   ISPs have blocked ports 25 and 80: Ownership of the files. There
   have been numerous discussions of this on music-related lists for
   example.

   The prime case was a couple of years ago, when msn.com was caught
   extracting things (mostly images) from customers' web sites and
   using them in ads.  When this got publicised and customers got
   outraged, msn's reply was to point to the fine print in their
   contract, which said that any files stored on their servers became
   the property of msn.

   It really hit the fan when this got publicised, and msn publicly
   backed down. However, people have pointed out that their rewording
   of the contract mostly had the result of obfuscating the legal
   situation.  Lawyers have said that they are likely still claiming
   copyright on any files on their servers, but now it'll take a court
   case to settle the issue due to the legal language used.

   The effect of this is that there's a high likelyhood that if you
   store anything, even "in transit", on an ISP's servers, you may
   very well have assigned the copyright to them.  This is an obvious
   threat to musicians who are putting their music online.  It also
   potentially affects anyone whose livelyhood depends somehow on
   "publishing" anything.  Writers, journalists, researchers, and so
   on.  There's a good chance that if something you make becomes
   commercially successful, your ISP can come along and sue you for
   violating their copyright on the fragments that you stored on their
   servers.

   They probably couldn't make a copyright claim on the contents of
   single IP packets. But if any of your files are financially
   valuable, you may want to think twice before allowing them to
   reside, even temporarily, on your ISP's servers.

#include <std/disclaimer/ianal.h>

There has been a lot of discussion on Groklaw about transfer of
copyright, and apparently it isn't that easy to automatically transfer
copyright, except in work for hire situations (which wouldn't be the
case here -- the ISP clearly doesn't hire you, as a customer, to
create content for them).  As discussed there, copyright (at least in
the US) can only be transferred in writing, and if I understood the
discussion there, the "writing" has to be rather specific about what
copyright is being transferred, and it sounded like it actually had to
be on paper.

I thought that the issue was that MSN was claiming that by storing
files on their server you were giving them some kind of nonexclusive
license to use them as they wished.  That would be controversial
enough, but it's a long way from actually trying to claim that by
storing files there you automatically transfer the copyright.

I can see that ISP's might have a legitimate concern: given nasties
like the DMCA, they could be scared that their customers might come
after them for making unauthorized copies in the form of backups (or
even transitory copies of the files in memory or some such).  So they
might well want explicit authorization to store files that they don't
have copyright to, and indemnification from their customers.  But
clearly (at least from the sound of it) MSN went rather farther than
that.

Finally, anything that's that financially valuable shouldn't be sent
or even stored unencrypted anyway.

Again, IANAL...

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton