CDA

[Jon Lebkowsky]

At 10:18 PM 6/26/97 -0700, Burt, David wrote:

>You seem to have missed my point entirely.  You seem to think that
>"support for free speech" is an all-or-nothing proposition, that people
>who oppose pornography in libraries are "against free speech".  You are
>talking about a specific category of speech that is a controversial grey
>area.  Not everyone agrees with you.  I think that if I were denouncing
>a well-established, commonly-held aspect of "free speech", such as
>handing out a handbill denouncing the government, you would have a
>point.  But I'm, not, I'm taking a stand on a controversial issue, which
>happens to be different than yours.

Speaking of missing the point...consider this:

1) Support for free speech may very well be 'all or nothing.'  If in a
'grey area' like pornography you try to define what should be excluded vs
what should not, you're completely in danger of throwing out the baby with
the bathwater, i.e. excluding works of value in the interest of excluding
works of no value. Furthermore, by using filtering software, you're
allowing a single commercial entity (the creator of the filtering software)
to define what has value and what does not.  One person's "objectionable
content" might be another person's art. I remind you that libraries in the
U.S. didn't carry James Joyce's _Ulysses_ or D.H. Lawrence's _Lady
Chatterly's Lover_ at one time because they were pornographic.

2) Certainly not everyone agrees with me.  However I think that my position
is in accord with the broadest possible set of information rights,
inclusive rather than exclusive. Confronted with the greatest library
resource in the world, you are happy to pay a third party vendor to define
exclusions from the virtual stacks, thinking that you exclude
"pornography," however that might be defined. Because the vendor's database
is hidden from view, however, you have no way to know what's been excluded.



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Jon Lebkowsky     *     jonl at onr.com     *     www.well.com/~jonl
President, EFF-Austin
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