Food for Thought

[KRFinch at dstsystems.com]

I agree.

As a commentary that relates this to an earlier topic, this sort of first
amendment freedom could easily extend to prevent forcing all companies with
adult content to adhere to a particular top level domain.  Playing the
devil's advocate for the moment, the government doesn't have a right to
tell someone what they can name their business.  If I want to name my
enterprise "obscenes.com" I should be able to (unless someone else already
has that same name and prevents it).  Forcing me to place my business at
obscenes.adult or the like could potentially damage my business by making
it difficult for customers to locate my business.

Furthermore, that name might have nothing to do with anything anyone could
consider offensive, but it could be censored unjustly under a domain-naming
censorship scheme.  Let's say that my business is actually a coffee shop in
a theatre district of a city that actually has one.  I could call my coffee
shop "Off Broadway Scenes", playing off of the theme of the neighborhood,
and trying to appeal to a given clientele.  "OBScenes" is a reasonable web
abbreviation for the on-line location of my business, and is the sort of
abbreviation that is commonplace on the web with businesses with long
names.  Such a name would never get past the censorware, even though the
most obscene thing about the business could be the price of a
double-mocha-half-caf.

I think government sponsored censorship in any form is just a bad idea,
even if it is good intentioned, because it sets a dangerous precedent.  I'm
sure most of the signers of the constitution would agree with me.  Just
adding my 2 pesetas...

- Kevin

                                                                                                    
               
                    Jason Clinton                                                                   
               
                    <clintonj at umkc.edu>          To:     Marvin GodfatherofSoul Bellamy 
<mbellamy at kc.rr.com>       
                    Sent by:                     cc:     "'kclug at kclug.org'" <kclug at kclug.org>      
               
                    owner-kclug at marauder.i       Subject:     Re: Food for Thought                  
               
                    lliana.net                                                                      
               
                                                                                                    
               
                                                                                                    
               
                    11/05/2002 04:48 PM                                                             
               
                                                                                                    
               
                                                                                                    
               

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Marvin GodfatherofSoul Bellamy wrote:
| I need to make a distinction between what I think is a good idea for
| filtering and what exists today.  If there's a law that states that
| pornographic sites and content have to be marked (headers, domain name,
| etc.), then your filtering is absolutely inclusive.  It's not the bogus
| filtering schemes that these commercial products rely on.  Also, it
| makes it easier to prosecute and monitor sites.  Is the site adhering to
| the law by indicating the nature of its content? No? Then penalize.  My
| guess is librarians don't want patrons whacking off in the stacks, but
| are most concerned with the objective nature of filtering by current
| commercial products.

Suppose there's a nude artist in San Francisco. The San Franciscian and
everyone
he's ever met in his city believes that nude art is speech and is not adult
content and under no circumstances be blocked on school computers.

In Little Rock, Arkansas there is a family that just got dial-up who's
twelve
year old daughter stumbled on to the San Franian's site while surfing for
contemporary art for a paper she was writting. The Arkansasian family sues
the
San Franian for not declairing his site 'lewd'. Under a federal court, who
is
right? These things should never be implemented at the federal level. The
moral
climate in this huge country cannot be controlled or legistlated from the
federal government or any government for that matter accross such a diverse
and
geographically large nation.

If, however, a coalition of Arkansas 'family values' organizations wants to
set
up a filter cache and provide free software from which adults can filter
and add
sites to be filtered to their database, more power to them. They could even
set
up a moderation system where domains get 'voted to be blocked by geographic
location' by concerned adults. When you install the software, you enter
your zip
code and it accesses moderations done by people near you. If Arkansas wants
to
implement the filtering software in Libraries, that should be up to
individual
communitites.

| The law should only be enforced in cases where a web site has spammed or
| broadcast links to its content without the indicators.  No need for a
| Porn Patrol snooping around any old porn site (but I'd volunteer).

"Selective" enforcement is never a good idea:
~   "I've never heard of anyone getting prosecuted under this law so I just
~   thought it was okay to not spend the extra time implementent content
~   declarations."
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