Internet

Future Social Media Policy (and policy)

By |2020-01-05T23:15:54-05:00April 21st, 2011|Blog|

In his article "The Challenge of Developing Effective Public Policy on the Use of Social Media," John Palfrey, co-director of Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, discusses the problems that American youth face in the wake of increased online social media presence in his article. One of Palfrey's  concerns is balancing the desire to encourage “...digital-era youth media practices (for  instance, [...]

Victory Over Transnational Libel Case Brought Against Book Review

By |2020-01-03T13:40:06-05:00March 8th, 2011|Blog|

In a victory for academic freedom, the Tribunal de Grand Instance de Paris has ruled against a libel case brought against Prof. Joseph Weiler for  GlobalLawBooks.org's review of The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. ICTY and ICTR Precedents, by Dr Karin N. Calvo-Goller. The judge ruled that Calvo-Goller engaged in forum shopping by selecting France as the venue [...]

Protecting Free Expression in the Wake of WikiLeaks

By |2016-01-25T10:59:34-05:00December 22nd, 2010|Incidents|

The National Coalition Against Censorship signed onto a letter circulated among U.S. government officials urging restraint in the aftermath of WikiLeaks. The letter was signed by 30 organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association, New America Foundation, among others.

NCAC Censored!

By |2020-01-03T13:39:00-05:00December 8th, 2010|Blog|

Censorship incidents on the web are more and more common, but it's still rare when they happen to an anti-censorship organization like the NCAC. Network Solutions, a company providing web services, has threatened to remove TheFileroom.org, an interactive archive of worldwide censorship cases administered by the National Coalition Against Censorship, unless a photograph of two naked children by Nan Goldin, [...]

Overbroad Internet Obscenity Law Comes Into Effect in Massachusetts

By |2020-01-03T13:38:19-05:00July 16th, 2010|Blog|

Massachusetts has become the latest state to try to try to protect minors from sexual content online at the expense of First Amendment rights. Like many states, Massachusetts has long had laws on the books making it a crime to provide minors with material deemed “harmful to minors.” But the law did not extend to electronic communications. Concerns about minors [...]

Setback for Net Neutrality

By |2020-01-03T13:37:36-05:00April 9th, 2010|Blog|

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court dealt a legal setback to supporters of “net neutrality.”  The court ruled (Comcast v. FCC) that the FCC does not presently have the authority to control an ISP’s network management practices and therefore cannot require Comcast (one of a small number of powerful corporations whose networks comprise the Internet) to treat all internet content equally. [...]

Internet Freedom Under Threat

By |2020-01-03T13:37:24-05:00March 8th, 2010|Blog|

The United States has a tradition of generally broad protection of freedom of speech, which has persisted in the Internet age.  Thus American courts have struck down most laws attempting to limit content on the Internet, including provisions of the Communications Decency Act restricting indecent speech on the Internet (in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997)) [...]

YouTube restores Amy Greenfield’s videos

By |2020-01-03T13:37:14-05:00February 26th, 2010|Blog|

Last week, NCAC and EFF protested YouTube's removal of work by acclaimed video-artist Amy Greenfield. NCAC applauds YouTube for so promptly responding to our letter and restoring Amy Greenfield's videos to its site (there are still some technical glitches but we are assured these will be taken care of soon). We are glad the company affirms that creativity and free [...]

Google Supports Free Speech in China … but not elsewhere

By |2020-01-03T13:37:03-05:00February 3rd, 2010|Blog|

LIGHT OF THE BODY (segment) from Amy Greenfield on Vimeo. Google has taken a firm position on censorship in China, yet, ironically, Google willingly and actively censors. It censors so as to conform to local laws, but it also censors deliberately and voluntarily by restricting speech on, for instance, YouTube (fully owned by Google). A recent example of the breadth [...]

Consequences of the Google China conflict: Hillary Clinton for an open Internet

By |2019-03-14T17:36:41-04:00January 26th, 2010|Blog|

In an impassioned speech at the Newseum in Washington on January 21, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked countries who limit the free circulation of peaceful dissent and religious ideas on the Internet and those who use the Internet for the "darker purposes" of promoting violence and making sexual advances on minors. She also spoke about the increasing concern over [...]

Google and the Snake

By |2020-01-06T00:08:37-05:00January 22nd, 2010|Blog|

It is, literally, an old story. In the legend of the boy and the snake, a venomous snake asks a boy for help, and promises not to bite him. When the snake bites the boy despite his help, and the boy asks why, the snake says, “because I am a snake.” The boy in the story learns an important lesson: [...]

Champions of free speech?: the Case of Google in China

By |2020-01-03T13:36:34-05:00January 21st, 2010|Blog|

When, a few years ago, Google agreed to China’s restrictions on the circulation of information and started google.cn, it claimed that “increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed [Google’s] discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.” Now, suddenly, Google is threatening to reverse its policy and close google.cn. This change of mind came [...]

School’s Punishment Runs Afoul of First Amendment Freedoms Online: J.C. v. Beverly Hills Unified School District

By |2020-01-03T13:36:30-05:00January 8th, 2010|Blog|

Schools that dish out draconian punishments to students who are mean to each other online (aka cyberbullying) risk running afoul of the First Amendment. Beverly Vista School, a K-8 school in the Beverly Hills Unified School District, learned this lesson via a November 2009 court ruling, where the federal district court for the Central District of California found that administrators [...]

Niche-Niche: Wikipedia refuses to remove content contrary to German lawyer’s cease and desist letters

By |2020-01-03T13:36:25-05:00January 7th, 2010|Blog|

The First Amendment provides American-based websites with the freedom to report on newsworthy events, including those that happen in other countries to citizens of other countries. Yet, the global nature of the Internet opens it up to legal challenges from countries with more restrictive speech regimes. Last fall, for instance, lawyers for the convicted murderers of German actor Walter Sedlmayr [...]

The FCC Favors Net Neutrality

By |2020-01-03T13:36:02-05:00September 23rd, 2009|Blog|

On Monday, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski announced the commission’s support of net neutrality, a principle which holds that Internet Service Providers (e.g. Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T) should not be permitted to discriminate against specific online content or applications and privilege other content with higher quality service. In introducing the National Broadband Plan, Genachowski, described some of the threats to an open internet posed [...]

AT&T Blocks (then Unblocks) img.4chan.org

By |2020-01-03T13:34:08-05:00July 27th, 2009|Blog|

This morning NCAC woke up to a mailbox full of hundreds of complaints against AT&T’s blocking access to img.4chan.org. The mass outrage over AT&T’s action had by that time also reached the company and led to the rapid unblocking of the site. AT&T denied any attempt to censor based on content and issued the following statement justifying the block as [...]

Courts favor “Douchebags”; Doninger redux, and the problem of school censorship when it comes to off campus Internet expression

By |2022-12-09T14:15:58-05:00June 5th, 2009|Blog|

Sonia Sotormayor’s joining Judge Debra Ann Livingston’s decision in the matter of Doninger v. Niehoff doesn’t provide information about her views relating to free expression. The Doninger decision was made in the context of nuanced civil procedure, and law governing student free speech rights previously mangled and misconstrued by other courts. If anything, the Doninger decision says more about the [...]

Knoxville to Students: No LGBT Websites

By |2016-01-25T10:59:34-05:00May 19th, 2009|Incidents|

6/23/2009 updated 11/5/2010 — In April 2009, students in Knoxville, Tennessee successfully challenged the Internet filtering policy in place at their school which was blocking access to LGBT websites. After the ACLU filed a lawsuit on the students' behalf, the school districts in question consented to change the filter settings that were unconstitutionally blocking the websites.

Facing the global audience: Flickr and censorship

By |2020-01-05T23:16:20-05:00February 4th, 2009|Blog|

The scene: Flickr permanently deletes accounts There are three Flickr* censorship stories floating around the internet at the moment (there are ongoing Flickr censorship stories). *Flickr – which let’s users upload photos and videos – is owned by Yahoo. One story is about photos taken down from a Flickr account (on threat of closing the account) for “offensive content.” That [...]

After COPA: Does Congress want to protect First Amendment freedom online?

By |2020-01-03T13:19:34-05:00February 2nd, 2009|Blog|

It’s censorship projection day today. Leslie Harris, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology weighs in on the political landscape for internet censorship post-COPA at the Huffington Post: So what happens next? Will Congress once again beat against the tide and enact yet another Internet censorship law? … Will the Obama administration slam the coffin on Internet [...]

Nipplephobia – Facebook and beyond

By |2020-01-02T15:58:26-05:00January 14th, 2009|Blog|

The latest scandal around Facebook's ban on images of nursing mothers, which show a glimpse of the areola or nipple, only presents us with the latest case of nipplephobia - an extreme panic reaction at the view of the female nipple (to my knowledge the male nipple fails to exert such power). Facebook's action was a misguided enforcement of its [...]

Schools to monitor online activities of students

By |2020-01-02T15:58:07-05:00December 29th, 2008|Blog|

There’s a push nationwide to monitor and punish students’ online behavior. According to the Des Moines Register, West Burlington is believed to be the first Iowa school district to consider including cyberspace as part of its student conduct policy, which says bad behavior can sideline children from sports, dances and other school activities. The plan not only raises the hackles [...]

2nd Amendment: Censored evolution editorial was plagiarized

By |2020-01-05T23:16:14-05:00December 15th, 2008|Blog|

We left for the weekend with a piece on a student's editorial that was pulled from the school paper. From the student's perspective, and from the principal's response, it seemed the article was pulled because it defended evolution and failed to mention creationism. Unfortunately, as reported today in the Roanoke Times, the article was plagiarized. According to the editorial, the [...]

REPORT: Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report

By |2017-12-05T12:22:10-05:00January 1st, 2006|FEPP Articles|

Every new technology brings with it both excitement and anxiety. No sooner was the Internet upon us in the 1990s than anxiety arose over the ease of accessing pornography and other controversial content. In response, entrepreneurs soon developed filtering products. By the end of the decade, a new industry had emerged to create and market Internet filters.

Coming Soon to Your Library – Culture Wars – The Sequel

By |2017-06-08T12:52:10-04:00February 3rd, 2000|Blog|

by Joan E. Bertin In Holland, Michigan, a small town near Grand Rapids, there’s a pitched battle over Internet censorship in the library. It’s only one salvo in what promises to be another long, drawn-out culture war. On February 22, voters in Holland will be asked to decide whether the city should withdraw funding from the district library if the [...]

Good News: Library Filters Rejected

By |2017-06-08T15:53:40-04:00February 1st, 2000|Blog|

Holland, Michigan On February 22 the community defeated, 55 to 44, a proposal to require filters on all Herrick District Library computers. For an article in The Holland Sentinel, click here. Background (Posted January 2000): On February 22, 2000, Holland, Michigan, will vote on a proposal to force the city to withdraw funding from the Herrick District Library unless the [...]

NCAC Letter to Key Senators About Internet School Filtering Act

By |2016-02-01T10:22:02-05:00April 8th, 1998|Incidents|

The following letter was sent to the members of the Senate Commerce Committee and other key senators. The complete list of recipients follows the text. I am writing to express concern about legislative efforts to restrict access to the Internet in schools and libraries, and particularly about S. 1619, the Internet School Filtering Act, which would require schools and libraries [...]

Internet Online Summit Must Respect 1st Amend Law and Values

By |2017-06-08T12:40:10-04:00December 1st, 1997|Blog|

The National Coalition Against Censorship has joined the Internet Free Expression Alliance to insure that the Internet Online Summit, which is dominated by an effort to restrict children's access to certain kinds of materials on the Internet, does not promote policies and practices that violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. NCAC urges participants in the [...]

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