United States v. American Library Association
Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 04:28AM
By Eric Richardson
Yesterday the US Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision upholding CIPA, a law that requires libraries to install filtering software on their Internet terminals or lose federal funding. I've put up brief analysis of the case I wrote several months back. The court opinions are available here. There are two things that most bother me about this law, and the resultant court cases.
- Coverage of CIPA and the resultant cases has continually misrepresented the law to only apply to filtering for children. This is simply not the case. The law also includes requirements that filtering be in place for adults. The only difference for children is the added requirement to filter material harmful to minors.
- Fundamentally, Congress and the Court are making a requirement that libraries implement technical solutions that simply do not exist. Despite what Congress, the Court, or the filtering companies might want to say, there is not a filtering solution that can possibly comply simply with the requirements of the law (without additional gross overblocking). The law requires that the filter be disabled for adults who legitimately request it, but this isn't the simple matter people would like to make it out to be. A significant burden will be imposed on adult users, and there's no way around this with current solutions.