Lawyer nixes filters

[Robert C. Williford]

Donald Barclay wrote:
> 
> Karen et al.,
> 
> I just came back from the Texas Library Association meeting . . . . <snip> 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.  

I seem to recall that one of the major online services (CompuServe?) got
in some trouble not too many years back for trying to filter their
user's email or chats.  Another service that imposed zero censorship had
no legal problems, since they claimed common carrier status.  The
service that tried to censor became responsible for the "bad stuff" that
managed to slip through (the whole issue of goodness of censorship to
one side for the moment), only because they attempted to intervene.  If
they never attempted to get involved in content, they wouldn't have had
a problem.

I, too, am uncomfortable helping develop the lists of potential excluded
sites for filtering providers.  It's also a never-ending workload--kinda
like Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

I do think that an innovative entrepreneur could make big bucks selling
inverse filtering software that creates pointers to all the nasty
stuff.  Maybe the project could be underwritten by a grant from Hustler
if they got exclusive rights to the "no-no" list?

Bob Williford
SISLT Student
University of Missouri-Columbia
http://www.missouri.edu/~c586704/