At 10:32 AM 1/9/96 -0500, Don Gaffney wrote:

On Mon, 8 Jan 1996, Harry Bartholomew wrote:

...

http://www.cdt.org/policy/freespeech/12_21.cda.html

This title may be cited as the "Communications Decency Act of 1995".

Perhaps some of our more lawyerly types can decipher whether it is getting better or worse as the conference committee chews. Not I.

I'm not a lawyer,

No kidding.

but from what I've read from the WWW site above, it seems that only providing "indecent" materials to minors is prohibited. I think this is already illegal.

No. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle can be sold or given to minors without restriction and yet it has published the word "fuck" on several occasions. This is considered "indecent" but not obscene. Likewise other newspapers, magazines, and books. The Supremes have upheld time, place, and manner restrictions on over-the-air broadcast of indecent material (The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television), but these restrictions do not apply to cable or even to broadcast later at night.

Broadcasting or sending unsolicited "indecent" materials is also prohibited, but that seems to have always been the case (except that objectionable materials have been called "obscence" rather than "indecent").

Obscene is different from indecent. What Congress is attempting to do is apply conventional broadcast TV and radio regulation to the Internet and other computer networks in spite of the fact that they are not like those systems and in any case those systems are supposed to be in the process of being deregulated themselves.

There are provisions, as I read it, that protect electronic intermediaries from the acts of the actual publishers of the materials (i.e. an ISP is not responsible for the material of other internet sites not under their control).

But the protections are phony because ISPs have to bend over backwards to block their systems from being used to transmit indecent material. It just deputizes them as cops. DCF "Frankly, my Dear. I don't give a damn." -- Indecency, 1939 style.