Lawyer nixes filters

[Burt, David]

Donald Barkley wrote:

> just came back from the Texas Library Association meeting in Fort Worth,
>and while there I attended a program on Internet use policies in
>libraries.  One of the librarians there (school? public?) said that the
>lawyer who vets her library's policies told her not to rely on filtering
>programs on the grounds that if a filtering program fails to weed out the
>bad stuff, the library could be secondarily liable.  Her lawyer said that
>relying on a use policy put them on safer legal ground.  This is, of
>course, the opinion of one lawyer. Other lawyers will probably say just
>the opposite.


I'm no lawyer, but I don't understand how if a library knew about an
undesirable situation in their library, and made a reasonable,
good-faith effort to stop it that fell short, that this would actually
increase their liability, as opposed to doing nothing.

  ***********************************************************
          David Burt, Information Technology Librarian 
          The Lake Oswego Public Library 
          706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
          URL:          http://www.ci.oswego.or.us/library/library.htm
          Phone:     (503) 635-0392 
          Fax:           (503) 635-4171 
          E-mail:      dburt at ci.oswego.or.us