By Bill Steele
Should Cornell delete "alt.sex" groups from its Usenet server? Should it censor student Web pages? Should it issue "adult" and "junior" net IDs to students depending on their ages? Should you have a "license" to surf the Net?
These are some of the questions Cornell -- and every other university or business connected to the Internet -- must wrestle with in the wake of the passage of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which seeks to keep children from finding sexually explicit material in cyberspace.
A group of legal scholars, working lawyers and censorship advocates debated these issues here last weekend in a symposium titled "Regulating Cyberspace: Is Censorship Sensible?" The event was sponsored by the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Participants included Bruce A. Taylor, president and chief counsel of the National Law Center for Children and Families; Chicago attorney and NetGuide Magazine columnist Mark Eckenweiler; Llewellyn J. Gibbons, the Honorable Abraham L. Freedman Fellow at the Temple University School of Law; Marjorie Hodges, policy adviser for Cornell Information Technologies; Adam Lehman, assistant general counsel for America Online; Robert W. Peters, president of Morality in Media; Alan Davidson, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology; and Pamela S. Samuelson, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School and visiting professor at the Cornell Law School. The symposium was attended mainly by law students, about half filling the MacDonald Moot Court Room in Myron Taylor Hall.
The CDA makes it a crime to post "indecent" material on the Internet in any place where it may be seen by anyone under the age of 18. In effect this prohibits such material entirely. Indecent material is defined as "any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs."
This is a broader category than obscenity, which is already prohibited on the Net by existing laws. Too broad, critics say, since it could include serious educational material and intellectual discussion. The law has been challenged in federal court as an infringement of free speech and on the grounds that the description is too vague.
Arguing for censorship, Taylor said that those applying the law would choose intelligently what to prosecute. "These laws have a vagueness built in to allow protected speech," he asserted. The decision would be based on intent, he said, so that "If you sell it as pornography, it is."
Congress would be perfectly happy to have adults sending indecent material on the Net, he said, if there were a way to restrict that material to adults. One of the ideas bandied about in the discussion was that of creating a system of net IDs that would identify adult or minors.
Others have proposed a rating system in conjunction with parental controls. This isn't the answer, Peters said, first because there will be no way to track and identify everything that should be restricted and, second, because many parents can't or won't use the system. "There are many laws which assist parents with their children," he said, citing laws restricting alcohol sales or prohibiting child abuse.
Legal scholars on the panels urged caution. Decisions we make now will affect the future of the Internet in ways we can't even understand today, Gibbons pointed out. Eventually, he and others said, technological and social solutions will emerge.
One major complaint is that those who advocate censorship are often not Net users themselves. Peters admitted, somewhat proudly, that he had never been on the Internet himself. His experience, he said, consisted of watching demonstrations at conferences where "indecent" sites were displayed.
Worse, some pointed out, most of those who wrote the laws don't understand how the Internet works either. This is one of the things that presents a problem for Cornell. The CDA exempts common carriers from liability for material transmitted across their systems; that means that Cornell, in its role of providing access to the Internet, is not responsible for what people see there. But in order to provide access to Usenet groups, the university must download copies of all the messages on some 12,000 groups to one of its own computers. As the law is written, that makes the university a "provider" of what's in those messages, even though they originate somewhere else.
Legally, Cornell is not responsible for anything a student might post on a personal Web page served from the student's own desktop computer in a dorm room. The university does not provide space for student pages on its own computers. But legal liability isn't the only thing the university has to worry about. "Part of my job [as adviser to CIT] is to keep Cornell from ending up on the front page of The New York Times," Hodges told the group. As if to underscore that, early this week lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department cited student Web pages at several universities as examples of indecent material available on the Internet.