ACLU suit challenges internet blocking programs. [American Civil Liberties Union]. .A lawsuit will determine if school leaders can evaluate certain Internet blocking programs to determine which program comes closest to meeting their district's needs. "Current copyright law and blocking software licenses prevent consumers from looking under the hood under the hood - [hot-rodder talk] 1. The underlying implementation of a product (hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not intuitively obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable the listener to grok it. of the blocking products they buy," says Anne Beeson, litigation An action brought in court to enforce a particular right. The act or process of bringing a lawsuit in and of itself; a judicial contest; any dispute. When a person begins a civil lawsuit, the person enters into a process called litigation. director of the American Civil Liberties Union American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), nonpartisan organization devoted to the preservation and extension of the basic rights set forth in the U.S. Constitution. Technology and Liberty Program. Beeson is lead counsel in Edelman v. N2H2 Inc., which was recently filed in federal court in Massachusetts. Software programs such as N2H2 are used to prevent students from accessing inappropriate Web sites. In the lawsuit, the ACLU contends that Benjamin Edelman, a computer researcher, has First Amendment and "fair use" rights to examine and share the full list of sites contained in N2H2 Internet blocking program. The lawsuit challenges provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law which implements two 1996 WIPO treaties. It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly of 19 9 8 and the non-negotiable N2H2 license, which restricts buyers from accessing the list of blocked sites. For schools to receive certain federal funds and discounts, such as E-rate, the Children's Internet Protection Act The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is one of a number of bills that the United States Congress has proposed in an attempt to limit children's exposure to pornography and other controversial material online. requires schools to use blocking software to restrict student access to Web sites that are "harmful to minors." And in 2001, more than 65,000 public schools used some sort of Internet blocking program, according to the National Center for Education Statistics The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), as part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), collects, analyzes, and publishes statistics on education and public school district finance information in the United States; conducts studies . Despite their widespread use, whether or not blocking programs actually work remains a question. Critics claim blocking programs prevent access to sites that should not be blocked and fail to block many sites that should be restricted. Expert testimony in an earlier ACLU lawsuit challenging CIPA listed nearly 400 wrongly blocked sites, including the Cedarwood Sudbury School, Pennsylvania Sled Dog Club and Organic Farming. Preliminary results of research conducted by the Online Policy Group and Electronic Frontier Foundation See EFF. (body) Electronic Frontier Foundation - (EFF) A group established to address social and legal issues arising from the impact on society of the increasingly pervasive use of computers as a means of communication and information distribution. found that schools that implement Internet blocking software with the least restrictive settings will block up to 5 percent of search results based on state-mandated curriculum topics. Schools that implement Internet blocking software with the most restrictive settings will block up to 70 percent of search results. www.aclu.org, ww.n2h2.com |
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