In the world of Internet litigation, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often are the target of lawsuits, even though the infringing activity may have been committed by a subscriber, with no inducement from the ISP. This can be explained many ways, most commonly because the ISP presumably has "deep pockets" as opposed to the subscriber, and also because the ISP can be found, and the subscriber is often unreachable.
In this section, we're going to discuss two of the problems ISPs are often subjected to: copyright infringement liability when a subscriber posts someone else's copyrighted work, and caching issues. The caching issues themselves arise in two distinct ways: caching as copyright infringement (such as when a "copy" of a copyrighted computer program is loaded into RAM for the purposes of opening it), and the advertising issues that arise when an ISP caches a web page to reduce bandwidth traffic problems for heavily-visited sites.
To sharpen your understanding of -- and reaction to -- these problems,
please begin by reading the attached Hypothetical
Problem, which has two variations: one on copyright liability, and one on bandwidth-related caching issues. At the end of each variation, you will find links to a variety
of legal and nonlegal resources that are relevant to these issues. After
perusing those resources, you are encouraged to participate in the various
discussion groups contained in the Virtual
Classroom.