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U.S. Supreme Court Upholds CIPA in Software Filtering Case
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the Children's Internet Protection Act ("CIPA") in American Library Association v. United States . This case involved litigation that was initiated by a number of parties including website publishers and the American Library Association against the U.S. federal government in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, challenging the constitutionality of CIPA, which, inter alia , forbids public libraries from receiving federal assistance for Internet access unless they install software to block obscene or pornographic images and prevent minors from accessing material harmful to them. The District Court held CIPA to be prima facie unconstitutional. The Government appealed to the United States Supreme Court. In reversing the lower court's decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the "government has broad discretion to make content-based judgments in deciding what private speech to make available to the public."
In the Court's opinion, the issue was whether libraries would be forced to violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by employing the filtering software that CIPA requires. The Court rejected the lower court's designation of the Internet as a "traditional" or "designated" public forum which is entitled to the "heightened scrutiny" standard of First Amendment protections. Instead, the Court held that a library's need to exercise judgment in making collection decisions depends on its traditional role in identifying suitable and worthwhile material and that it is no less entitled to play that role when it collects material from the Internet than when it collects material from any other source. The Court noted that most libraries already exclude pornography from their print collections because they deem it inappropriate for inclusion and argued that since these decisions are not subject to heightened scrutiny, it would make little sense to treat libraries' judgments to block online pornography any differently. Recognizing the practical limitations of the analogy to a library's traditional book collection, the Court said that "because of the vast quantity of material on the Internet and the rapid pace at which it changes, libraries cannot possibly segregate, item by item, all Internet material that is appropriate for inclusion from all that is not and as such it is entirely reasonable for libraries to exclude certain categories of content, without making individualized judgments that everything they do make available has the requisite and appropriate quality."
While acknowledging the tendency of filtering software to "overblock", that is to erroneously block access to constitutionally protected speech that falls outside the categories that software users intend to block, the Court noted that blocked sites could be unblocked at the request of a library patron or, if necessary, the entire filtering system could be disabled to permit "bona fide research or other lawful purpose." In response to the lower court's concern that some library patrons might be too embarrassed to request an exemption, the Court noted that "the Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment".
For a copy of the decision, visit: