Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Not two weeks after we agreed with David Kurtz that it is an unfortunate time to be an American, we hear news from the Supremes (Court, that is) that stirs hope in our hearts.  From a New York Times editorial: The Supreme Court's ruling yesterday striking down a federal ban on "virtual" child pornography sent a clear message to would-be censors: The government must be scrupulous, when regulating obscene material, not to infringe on protected speech. But the Times's editorial goes on with a call to action: The decision is especially welcome now, as a three-judge court in Philadelphia is poised to rule on a federal law that seeks to force libraries to censor the Internet use of their patrons. Our faithful reader (hi, Mom!) may recall that Dr. Bonzo suffers from a kind of posthumous censorship by CyberPatrol, as evidenced by the product of a little Google search: [Macro error: The server, api.google.com, returned a SOAP-ENV:Server fault: Exception from service object: Invalid authorization key:] Another vanished Web page that is still blocked is the Dr. Bonzo web page, http://www.iglou.com/drbonzo/anathema.htm [dead link!], a series of satirical essays on religious matters. The blocking of these two pages, long removed from the Web, raises questions about the frequency with which the Cyber Patrol database is updated. A third blocked page which is no longer on the Web contained nothing but a copy ofthe U.S. Constitution. —  Jonathan Wallace at Censorware.net It pains us to think that there may be others out there, whose valuable and useful content may be extant but similarly wrongly blocked (as described by Wallace in his CyberPatrol essay). It behooves us all — not just the Philadelphia appeals court — to remember, as the Times reminds us, that These are critical times for establishing the scope of our freedoms on the Internet. Courts right now are laying the groundwork — principles that could last for generations — for how legal doctrines like freedom of expression and copyright will be applied in cyberspace. 12:52:08 AM

Oh joy!  Oh delight!  Our day is made complete and whole with this good news: One of our very favoritest cartoonists in the whole world, Tom Tomorrow (creator of This Modern World) has a blog. We are at last free to sleep, for one night at least, in grace and peace. 12:35:28 AM