Supreme Court to Hear CIPA Case

Ruger writes "The Supreme Court of the United States will "decide if public libraries can be forced to install software blocking sexually explicit Web sites," according to this article from the Associated Press. US lawmakers have passed three laws to 'protect' children from Internet pornography, but the Court struck down the first and blocked the second from taking effect. 'A three-judge federal panel ruled the Children's Internet Protection Act violates the First Amendment because the filtering programs also block sites on politics, health, science and other non-pornographic topics.'" Our previous story on this ongoing case will bring you up to speed on the issues.

Comments

Re:There's only one question...

[Kamel Jockey]

I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.

How about a compromise solution? I'm sure anyone who is all for unfiltered access can certainly agree that there is content that is completely inappropriate for a child to view under any circumstances. So... how about setting up separate banks of computers in the library instead? One could be completely unfiltered, and accessible only to adults, and the other could be in the children's section, with filtered access, and hopefully a requirement that parents actively supervise their children's web-surfing.

You can send your paycheck to the following...

[RatBastard]

(I'll bet dollars to donuts anybody who was browsing hardcore porn on a library computer would quickly find his access to said computer cut off)

Sorry, but that's just not the way it works. My wife works for the local city library and people are constantly looking at hard core porn there. Their solution? Bury the moniters in the desk so that only the person using the workstation can see the screen.

Libraries don't want to know what you are looking at. Most don't even keep any records of who uses them anymore. What they don't know they can't be compelled to tell the FBI under the Patriot Act.

School libraries might have different policies, but municipal public libraries, for the most part, are not interested in knowing what you do on their internet terminals.