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Supreme Court Upholds Filtering for Libraries
Supreme Court Rules Libraries Must Filter
Message Posted June 24, 2003
Yesterday, the Supreme Court announced its decision regarding the constitutionality of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) as applied to libraries. CIPA required schools and libraries receiving E-rate funds to install software to block visual depictions of obscenity or child pornography and to prevent minors from accessing pornographic material deemed to be harmful to them. In response to a suit filed by the American Library Association and others, a lower court found the blocking requirements as applied to libraries to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court, ruling that the filtering requirements were constitutional.
Little is known yet what steps the SLD will take next. Their website only states that they are awaiting guidance from the Federal Communications Commission in response to the Supreme Court decision. As soon as I learn more, I'll share it with you. In the meantime, below is the text of an article from the Washington Post which provides some excerpts of the Court's decision.
Supreme Court Upholds Internet Filters
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 23, 2003; 11:59 AM
The Supreme Court upheld today a federal law that seeks to prevent Internet users at public libraries from gaining access to pornography, a decision that could affect the online choices available to millions of Americans who use the World Wide Web at libraries.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court said the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires libraries that receive federal Internet aid to use anti-pornography filtering software, does not violate the constitutional guarantee of free speech.
The law had been opposed by the American Library Association and a coalition of Internet users and Web sites. They argued that filtering software is so imprecise that, in aiming at child pornography and other obscene material, it blocks not only a large amount of constitutionally protected sexual material, such as medical information and avant-garde art. Other, less restrictive means, would work better, they said.
"While a library could limit its Internet collection to just those sites it found worthwhile, it could do so only at the cost of excluding an enormous amount of valuable information that it lacks the capacity to review," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in an opinion that was joined by three other justices, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. "Given that tradeoff, it is entirely reasonable for public libraries to reject that approach and instead to exclude certain categories of content, without making individualized judgments. . . ."
The other two votes in support of the court's judgment came from two strong supporters of free speech, Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote separate concurring opinions to explain their reasons for voting to uphold CIPA.
The decision was something of a departure for a Supreme Court that has generally taken an expansive view of the First Amendment in recent years. In two previous reviews of attempts by Congress to regulate sexually explicit material in cyberspace during the last half-decade, the court struck down one previous law on First Amendment grounds and issued a mixed ruling on a second.
But in this case, Rehnquist wrote, the law was not an abuse of Congress' powers to control how the money it spends is used. CIPA "does not violate [library] patrons' First Amendment rights, [and] does not induce libraries to violate the Constitution" themselves.
Kennedy wrote that he was satisfied that adults could have the filtering software removed simply by asking librarians to do so. Breyer explained that he would have subjected the law to a higher degree of constitutional scrutiny than Rehnquist's plurality, but would have found that the harm it caused to free speech was not disproportionate to the benefits in terms of preventing the dissemination of obscene or illegal material.
Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.
About 143 million Americans use the Internet regularly, and about 10 percent of them rely on access at a public library. Some 95 percent of all U.S. libraries now offer Internet access, and federal aid has been a crucial factor in this expansion.
The aid comes through two separate programs. The first, the "E-rate" program administered by the Federal Communications Commission, requires Internet service providers to give discounts to libraries; this was worth $58.5 million to libraries in the year ending June 2002. The second provides direct federal grants to link libraries to the Internet; the grants totaled more than $149 million in fiscal 2002.
The case is U.S. v. American Library Association Inc., et al., No. 02-361
Julie Tritt Schell
jtschell@comcast.net
(717) 730.7133 (voice)
(717) 730.9060 (fax)
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