Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 21 April, 1997

In a brash attempt to hold Compuserve responsible for material its customers may access from many Internet sites, prosecutors in Munich, reputed to be Germany's most conservative city, have arrested Felix Somm, general manager of Compuserve Deutschland. Somm has been accused of failing to block the company's German customers from receiving illegal Nazi commentaries as well as child pornography.

Company spokespersons reacted by calling the charges ludicrous. Others explained that holding a general manager of a communications company responsible for what customers send to one another is like charging the CEO of a major telephone company for obscenities phone customers trade when talking on private lines.

Compuserve has hired German experts in computer law to respond to the police accusations. Legal scholars, who have followed police activity involving the Internet on a world scale, believe that this present investigation, which has been conducted for a year, is "unprecedented."

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, said, "We think this is the first prosecution of an on-line service for information provided over the Internet."

The police action comes at a time when the German Parliament is expected to enact a bill that would explicitly remove any undue responsibilities from the shoulders of companies like Compuserve. The new law would not hold the company executives responsible, as the Munich police are presently doing, for material received by individuals over the Internet.

Europeans have, of late, been outraged by revelations about a child pornography ring in Belgium in which several members, accused of murder, used the Internet for storage and shipping. "Europeans' fears about Internet usage are totally unfounded and the fact of such usage by criminals has no logical bearing on arguments about a free Internet," says Kevin Hargrove, a free-Internet activist. "We'd certainly laugh heartily if--long ago-- turn-of-the-century police had blamed the telephone, shortly after its invention, saying that murderers had used it to plan their deeds. We ought to laugh just as heartily now, at the Munich police. Individual users are to blame, not the Internet itself. The vast majority of users shouldn't lose our rights to freedom of expression just because a few twisters who misuse it."

Compuserve, Inc., which is majority owned by H &.R Block., Inc, took drastic steps in 1995, censoring a wide variety of Internet sites following an initial German complaint. According to Rex Wockner, GayToday's international correspondent, gay newsgroups were hit hard in the sweep.

"Non-sexually oriented groups were banned," explains Wockner, including gay and lesbian coming-out support groups and serious sites hosting gay news commentaries.