CDA Oral Arguments: Filtering the OPAC

[Rich Greenfield]

Re Karen Schneider's recent post to Web4Lib, it wasn't clear to me if she and
other subscribers had read the following language from the March 19 Supreme
Court oral arguments on the CDA  in which a Deputy Attorney General of the
Department of Justice, Mr. Waxman, advocates "filtering" metadata, i.e.,
MARC records. 

Excerpted from http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/trial/sctran.html

Mr. Waxman, Deputy Solicitor General

"Now, as to the library, the Carnegie Library is an appellee in this case, and it
is a very good example of what we think represents the overblown nature of
the challenge to this act.

     The library wants to do two things. It wants to put its card catalogue on
line so that anybody anywhere in the country can see what it is that the
Carnegie Library has, and it also wants to put on line journals and abstracts
that it in turn receives on line in an electric form.

     Now, the definition, the accepted definition of what is patently offensive,
that is a term of art. It is very narrow, and it is exceedingly difficult to see how
it would apply to more than a handful of cards in a card catalogue, but to the
extent that it does, you can simply run it through some sort of word processor
or computer program to screen -- it's only text, after all, on cards, and if you
find a card that -- 

[deletion]

Justice Stevens

QUESTION: May I ask you just for a little more clarification about your
specific example of the Carnegie -- 

     MR. WAXMAN: Yes.

     QUESTION: -- the library posting a card that they know would violate the
statute if it is read by an -- 17-year-old. Now, what does this software do
exactly, that you are describing? It identifies all the adult people who have
access to adult material. That means that anybody who does not have that
cannot see it?

     MR. WAXMAN: What the -- Justice Stevens, what the -- if the library found
that there were any library cards that contained material that could be deemed
patently offensive, they would take the -- 

     QUESTION: Let's assume they know something would be, so it -- 

     MR. WAXMAN: Okay. Let's assume there's that. If they had that, what
they would do is, with respect to those cards, or those journals that they know
to be patently offensive, they would put them in a little section of their Web
site in which to get access to it. If you want to see -- we have certain other
cards -- 

     QUESTION: So that everyone who does not have the adult identification
equipment, whatever it is, those people just don't see it.

     MR. WAXMAN: That's right.

     QUESTION: So that in order to get access to that if you're a viewer, you
have to do whatever's necessary to become an identified adult.

     MR. WAXMAN: That's right. It's the exact analogy to what may very well
happen to the Carnegie Library itself in Pittsburgh.