roundtable: Re: Censorship and pornography

roundtable: Re: Censorship and pornography

Re: Censorship and pornography

Pamela Davis (pdavis@pipeline.com)
Tue, 21 Mar 1995 20:06:44 -0500 

From: Pamela Davis <pdavis@pipeline.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 20:06:44 -0500
Message-Id: <199503220106.UAA16646@pipe3.nyc.pipeline.com>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: Censorship and pornography 


Subject: Re: Censorship and pornography 

Whatever the merits of this particular proposal, I don't 
believe it addresses the true thrust of the  pending 
legislation (which is not, of course, the only such legislation 
which may be contemplated).  Existing law prohibits obscene or 
harassing phone calls and imputes  responsibility to the 
carrier.  This responsibility has one effect that many people 
consider benign; that is, that the phone company will cooperate 
in assisting the victims of such calls. 

The pending legislation extends this scheme to the net, 
without, apparantly, appreciating that the net is only 
analogous to phone calls to the extent of email.  With respect 
to the much larger, and public or quasipublic, aspects of the 
net, the analogy is totally inappropriate.  The fact that the 
immediate concern is individual abuse, as opposed to access to 
Xrated stuff, I believe is evidenced by the current attempt to 
prosecute the college student in, I think, Michigan.

Many people may legitimately want to have the same protection 
when the phone line is hooked to a computer as they have for 
convential telepone use.  But neither they nor the carriers 
necessarily wish for this to be extended to bulletin boards, 
usenet, lists or all the other aspects of the net.  

This, I believe, is the problem to be addressed.


Pamela Davis
<pdavis@pipeline.com>

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