THE American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organisations have filed a lawsuit to block new US legislation banning "indecent" material on the Internet. The bill would make it a crime punishable by $250,000 in fines and two years in prison to send "indecent" material that could be viewed by a minor over a computer network.
The district judge handling the case gave government lawyers until next Wednesday to file a written argument before making a ruling. Coincidentally, February 14th marks the 50th anniversary of the public unveiling of the first all electronic computer in Philadelphia.
After the court hearing, Kyoshi Kuromiya of the Critical Path AIDS project in Philadelphia said he would not be deterred by the legal uncertainty. "Basically the First Amendment is on hold," he told reporters after the court hearing. "We will continue providing sexually explicit AIDS information in the meantime."
Advocates of free speech on the Internet have urged supporters to wear blue ribbons or temporarily shut down their pages on the World Wide Web in protest, and to contact their congressional representatives. Another protest campaign, termed "Paint it Black" and "The Thousand Points of Darkness", was launched across the Web, as formerly brightly coloured home pages were replaced with new ones cast in black to commemorate passage of the law. The blacked out pages referred viewers to secondary sites containing related commentary.
A leading publishing firm of Internet related titles, Ziff Davis, called the new legislation "frightening and profane". "The irony is that the editor of our print magazine has [constitutional] protection while the editor of the same on line magazine is held to a stricter standard" under the bill, a spokesman said.
"I think it's more a statement of philosophy than anything else," said Paul Gillin, editor of Computerworld magazine.
"The fact is you can't contain a lot of this stuff, and in practice I restrictions just can't work."
Meanwhile Playboy magazine says it has no plans to pull the Playmate of the Month from its Web site, where it was business as usual last week. "Good heavens, no, of course we're not going to shut it off or change the content," a spokeswoman said. "It's one of the most popular sites on the Web."
. China's latest Internet regulations have raised fears in Hong Kong's legislative council's information policy panel. Legislation which came into effect a week ago requires all networks to disband and reregister - and use lines provided by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
The Internet could be one of the "first battlefronts determining where Hong Kong's autonomy ends and China's authority begins in matters affecting both places," an information technology consultancy at the University of Hong Kong said in a statement.