Moderator's Legal Responsibility and Accountability in the Anonymous Electronic Computer Bulletin Board System

Abstract

I have been researching the moderator's legal responsibility and accountability through several typical civil suits of Japan and the United States of America. The decisions of these trials clarified that not only the moderator would be requested to delete all of the improper data but also s/he would be demanded to maintain all of those as evidence. Here, I discuss the criminal charge as well as the civil liability of the moderator, especially in the case where s/he did delete all of the data that never had seemed so appropriate beforehand before the trouble would be well known.