by Jessica Reed
Yesterday a Philadelphia court has defeated an effort made by Congress to "regulate" harmful for minors speech on the Internet. This would have applied to pornography, but also websites like Salon.com, Nerve.com and Scarleteen.com, a website promoting responsible sexual education for teenagers:
A U.S. federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial website operators to let children access “harmful” material.
In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech (Globe and Mail).
But can parents really trust "nanny softwares" which are part of a private market to truly do their job? Lawrence Lessig says no: the private software market may damage free speech by censoring sites which are not explicitly pornographic. Despite being a liberal, he says, he thinks doing nothing would harm free speech. His fantastic and really simple video shows exactly what should need to be done by the government to protect both free speech and children.
