YES!!!!!
Hot damn! By a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has blocked the Child Online Protection Act as a muzzle on free speech! They haven't overturned it; they sent it back to the lower court to see if the technology has improved any in the last five years.
From the MSNBC article:
For now, the law, known as the Child Online Protection Act, would sweep with too broad a brush, Kennedy wrote.
"There is a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech" if the law took effect, he wrote.
Kennedy said that filtering software "is not a perfect solution to the problem of children gaining access to harmful-to-minors materials."
He said that so far, the government has failed to prove that other technologies would work better.
alysswolf, librarians do *such* good work!!
ETA: The BBC article on this can be found here, and thanks to ajhalluk for the link!
From the MSNBC article:
For now, the law, known as the Child Online Protection Act, would sweep with too broad a brush, Kennedy wrote.
"There is a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech" if the law took effect, he wrote.
Kennedy said that filtering software "is not a perfect solution to the problem of children gaining access to harmful-to-minors materials."
He said that so far, the government has failed to prove that other technologies would work better.
alysswolf, librarians do *such* good work!!
ETA: The BBC article on this can be found here, and thanks to ajhalluk for the link!