Slashdot Mirror
Trial Begins Over Library Censorship
Justen writes: "CBS has a story on the Philadelphia trial over the Children's Internet Protection Act, signed by President Clinton in 2000. This is the first challenge to come to trial, challenging the act which aimed to censor pornography and other "inappropriate" websites in libraries and other government-subsidized public Internet access-points. The big shocker? The challenge has the support of a large number (3,000) of libraries, librarians, and library patrons."
Just block all of the sites that cover black lung and cave-ins
Is anyone surprised that the challenge has broad support from libraries and librarians? I've worked in libraries pretty much solidly since 1994, and I've never never ever met any librarian who thought that censorware was a good idea.
The reason? Censorware is simply too broad. There exists many cases where censorware companies blocked not only obscene material but also perfectly legitimate constitutionally-protected material like sites on women's rights and birth control. And as for pornography, what happens when someone is doing legitimate research on porn or needs to access material commonly described as porn? The last library I worked at stocks Playboys (and yes, this is one time when the old saw about "buying playboys for the articles" actually is actually true). You had to ask for them at the front desk, but they were there.
Anyway, bottom line -- this is Yet Another Totally Unconstitutional Load of Bull-Plop that even the lizards on the current Supreme Court will probably strike down. Hopefully.
"It's not just Playboy soft-porn nudity. A lot of it's torture. A lot of it's bestiality. And a lot of it is teen hard-core sex," said Donna Rice Hughes
Seen from the Europen side of the Atlantic this is the old story of American women societies dominating the countries official morale since the wild west. A French prime minister for example would never be considered uncapable of doing politics just because he had a girl friend after office hours. Everybody would just say "Gee, he's still a man of power, our prime minister, isn't he?".
The porno sites would not be there, if nobody would ever click on their links. Where are these clicks coming from, from dirty ol' men overseas only? And the interest in pornography would not be that great, if normal sex life was accepted and more freely available.
Double morale, politicians fear the influence of the old womens societies and that's it. On the surface - while underneath Big Brother is watching you. The result will be less money for organisations who really need it - public libraries. My god! Who has ever though about viewing porno sites in a public library? Must be pretty twisted brains who think that an imminent thread the government should be concerned with.
Carrying guns is OK, but dicks - my god!
It's simplistic to claim that this argument boils down to Republicans attempting to carve away at our first amendment rights to fit their own morality.
The internet holds a vast amount of pornography that is so crude it can not be placed on news stands. Of that number there is a percentage of this content that is and was illegal well before the popularity of the Internet came acrossed the country.
A large problem for these public places not that normal pornography would be acessable to minors, but that the illegal type would be availble to everyone.
If JohnDoe access child porn from a library and the police arrest him on his way home from the library can the library be sued for letting him access it? Normal people would say of course not. But the court system is fill of libal cases that Slashdot readers think are too stupid to goto trial.. and every case costs money.
Of course this is just my wonderings about the subject.
* 2002-03-25 16:30:16 First Challenge to CIPA (yro,censorship) (rejected)
From the NY Times article:
"The coalition of plaintiffs includes the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and Jeffrey L. Pollock, a Republican Congressional candidate who favored mandatory filtering until he discovered that his own campaign's Web site was blocked by one of the most popular filtering programs."
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/3/25/8925/06088
Censorware - changing the debate from "filtering" (Technology)
By Seth Finkelstein
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Instead of trying to filter kid-unsafe material .minors or whatever) domain where the
out of the existing 3 billion or so websites,
you'd think the sponsors of COPA could've just
told ICANN to get off their asses and set up a
.kids (or
offending content could not be legally hosted.
>;k