The district court of Oslo has ruled that Scandinavian ISP and telco Tele2 (http://www.tele2.se/) is legally liable for distributing pictures containing child porn and other indecent images in its newsgroups.

Tele2 was fined a hefty NOK 500,000 ($63,500) by the Norwegian court, reported Scandinavian Web site Digi.no.

Markus Takte, Tele2's CEO in Norway, says the company will appeal this 'absurd' ruling. He claims that he is merely a distributor of the content and not publisher - and therefore cannot carry the same responsibilities as a publisher.

However, the ruling appears to have caused at least one ISP to think again. Telenor (http://www.telenor.no/) - one of Tele2's competitors - immediately shut down all its newsgroups that it thought may have contained indecent pictures.

The Norwegian authority Okokrim (http://www.okokrim.no/) - a law enforcement agency for white collar crimes - is reported as saying that the move by Telenor was an over-reaction.

However, Okokrim consider the ruling against Tele2 as the right outcome.

The ruling has also caused quite a stir in Sweden, (Tele2 is a Swedish company). The ruling - if not changed upon appeal - may lead to a situation where the ISPs are forced to lessen interactivity in the networks and apply a cable operator business model to
their systems - rather like AOL. Hence, the Internet runs a risk of being split up into small islands with decreased interactivity between the networks. The latter effect is commonly referred to as 'splinternet'.

Mikael Pawlo is a Swedish lawyer who specialises in Internet regulation. His website is here (http://www.algonet.se/~mpawlo/).

Related links

Case report by Digi.no (in Norwegian):
(http://www.digi.no/dtno.nsf/pub/md20020606150502_kvi_79098191) Digi.no on the Telenor shutdown (still Norweigan (http://www.digi.no/dtno.nsf/pub/md20020606164817_kvi_61940032)
Digi.no on Okokrim's reaction to the shutdown (You guessed it) (http://www.digi.no/dtno.nsf/pub/md20020606174835_okv_85883726)

Splinternet theory (http://www.law.usm.maine.edu/mlta/works/01/splinter.htm)
It's bloody hard to run a forum (in Sweden) (http://theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24352.html)