Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling eBook

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 196 pages of information about Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling.

Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling eBook

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 196 pages of information about Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling.
support in the role that public libraries have traditionally served in maintaining First Amendment values.  As evidenced by the many public libraries that have endorsed the Freedom to Read Statement and the Library Bill of Rights, see supra Subsection ii.D.1, public libraries seemingly have a duty to challenge prevailing orthodoxy and make available to the public controversial, yet constitutionally protected material, even if it means drawing the ire of the community.  See Bd. of Educ. v.  Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 915 (1982) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (noting that “public libraries” are “designed for freewheeling inquiry").  By interfering with public libraries’ discretion to make available to patrons as wide a range of constitutionally protected speech as possible, the federal government is arguably distorting the usual functioning of public libraries as places of freewheeling inquiry.  The Velazquez Court, in invalidating the federal government’s restrictions on the ability of federally funded legal services providers to challenge the constitutionality of welfare laws, relied on the manner in which the restrictions that the federal government placed on legal services’ attorneys’ speech distorted the usual functioning of the judicial system: 

[T]he Government seeks to use an existing medium of expression and to control it, in a class of cases, in ways which distort its usual functioning. . . .  The First Amendment forb[ids] the Government from using the forum in an unconventional way to suppress speech inherent in the nature of the medium.

531 U.S. at 543.  By the same token, CIPA arguably distorts the usual functioning of public libraries both by requiring libraries to:  (1) deny patrons access to constitutionally protected speech that libraries would otherwise provide to patrons; and (2) delegate decision making to private software developers who closely guard their selection criteria as trade secrets and who do not purport to make their decisions on the basis of whether the blocked Web sites are constitutionally protected or would add value to a public library’s collection.  At all events, CIPA clearly does not seem to serve the purpose of limiting the extent of government speech given the extreme diversity of speech on the Internet.  Nor can Congress’s decision to subsidize Internet access be said to promote a governmental message or constitute governmental speech, even under a generous understanding of the concept.  As the Court noted in Reno v.  ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), “[i]t is no exaggeration to conclude that the content on the Internet is as diverse as human thought.”  Id. at 852 (internal quotation marks omitted).  Even with software filters in place, the sheer breadth of speech available on the Internet defeats any claim that CIPA is intended to facilitate the dissemination of governmental speech.  Like in Velazquez, “there is no programmatic message of the kind recognized in Rust and which sufficed

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Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.