Cyberporn and communication decency

Abstract

On 1 February 1996, a US Government statute called the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed by Congress, with the intent of controlling Internet pornography and making the Net safe for children by banning ‘indecent’ content. A widely criticised Time magazine cover story on ‘cyberporn’, based on a paper published by the Georgetown Law Journal, had some influence on the preceding political debate, and presents an interesting case study of academic and commercial publishing and journalism. On 11 June 1996, a three-judge court, hearing cases by the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association, decided that the CDA was unconstitutional under First Amendment protection of free speech. Non-legislative solutions to the problems of indecency and censorship are offered by software for filtering Internet content. A Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) standard has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to include content ratings labels in documents, for identification by browsing and filtering software.