MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
in coordination with
Harvard Law School: Internet and Society
Fall Semester, 1999
Week 5, Oct. 4 - 8:
Controversial content and content control
Overview
We'll begin by reviewing the Supreme Court decisions that define
obscenity and the basis for regulating content in broadcasting. This
leads into the "Great Internet Censorship Saga" culminating in the
1997 Supreme Court decision in Reno v. ACLU and the emergence of
filtering technologies such as PICS.
Having added filtering to the Web architecture, has the Internet
community set the stage for inevitable censorship and regulation?
Readings for Tuesday (be prepared to discuss these in class):
- Read through the page in the class archives on The
Internet Censorship Saga from the course archives. On a first
reading, don't follow any of the links -- just get an overview.
- Now go back and follow some of the links. At a minimum, read the
following pieces to prepare for class discussion
- Philip Elmer-Dewitt's July 1995 "Cyberporn" report in
Time Magazine.
- Senator Exon's remarks on the Senate floor, June 9, 1995.
- The Communications Decency Act, as enacted by Congress in February 1996.
- John Perry Barlow's "Cyberspace Independence Declaration"
Oral reports for Tuesday:
Tuesday class, Oct. 5: Content control
and controversial speech on the Internet. The
Cyberporn controversy.
Readings for Thursday (be prepared to discuss these in class):
- The transcript of the oral arguments and the decision of the
Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU
- Paul Resnick and James Miller, PICS:
Internet Access Controls Without Censorship,
Communications of the ACM, 1996, vol. 39(10),
pp. 87-93.
- Fahrenheit
451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?, ACLU white paper on the dangers of
internet blocking software, August 7, 1997.
- "Free Speech", a chapter from the forthcoming book by
Larry Lessig,
Code, and other Laws of
Cyberspace, (to be distributed in class).
- World Wide Web Consortium, Statement on the
Intent and Use
of PICS: Using PICS Well
Thursday class, Oct. 7:
Reno v. ACLU.
PICS and the controversy over labelling
- Our guests today will be Joseph Reagle of the W3C and Steve
Balkam of the International Content Rating Association
Writing assignment: No writing assignment for this week.
Additional resources for this topic
The following pieces are not assigned, but you may find them useful
to browse though or to use as references if you plan to write a paper
on this topic.
- Loudoun v. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library
(E.D. Va. 1998) online at
http://www.techlawjournal.com/courts/loudon/80407mem.htm.
- Paul Resnick, Filtering
Information on the Internet, Scientific American, 106-108
(March 1997).
- Lawrence Lessig, Tyranny in
the Infrastructure, 5.07 Wired, (1997).
- Lawrence Lessig and Paul Resnick,
The
Architectures of Mandated Access Controls (Draft -- in PDF format).
- W3C,
Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), home page.
- EPIC,
Faulty Filters: How Content Filters Block Access to Kid
Friendly Information on the Internet (December, 1997).
- Filtering
out the filters, news article, August 19, 1998.
- The Censorware project
- Wayne B. Salamonsen and Roland Yeo,
PICS-Aware Proxy System vs. Proxy Server Filters
- Laurie Cantor, Paul Resnick, and Danielle Gallo,
Technology Inventory:
A Catalog of Tools that Support Parents' Ability to Choose
Online Content Approrpriate for their Children
, Prepared for the Internet Online Summit:
Focus on Children, and revised, September 1998.
Return to course calendar
Return to course home page
Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu)
Mike Fischer (mfischer@mit.edu)
Danny Weitzner (djweitzner@w3.org)
Jonathan Zittrain (zittrain@law.harvard.edu)
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Last modified: October 9 1999, 9:40 PM