AOL May Be Liable for Copyrighted Posting

America Online, the world’s largest Internet service provider, may be liable for a posting of copyrighted stories by science fiction author Harlan Ellison because of an e-mail oversight, a U.S. appeals court said.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated part of the writer’s case against AOL, ruling that the Time Warner Inc. unit might not be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it failed to maintain an e-mail address to receive notices of improper postings by subscribers.

However, AOL won a larger victory in the case because the appeals court agreed that the ISP qualified for a liability protection under the 1998 act because the newsgroup material moved through its servers automatically.