Speak freely, act responsibly.
	"Act as free men, but do not let your freedom be a cover for evil." - Apostle Peter to churches in the Mediterranean

Why this page is not black...

All around the Web, pages have turned black and sprouted blue ribbons to protest the Communications Decency Act recently signed by the President. The Act places substantial penalties on people who knowingly place "indecent" or "obscene" material on the Web with the intent to harass others or where they know minors can gain easy access to it. The authors of the Act stated they were especially concerned about postings made with the intent to entice children into illicit acts.

There appears to be a fairly common misperception that freedom equals license; that being free to do something means you possess an irrevocable license to do it. What seems to be lacking is an understanding that our "rights" also confer an irrevocable responsibility to exercise our freedoms intelligently and responsibly. In the case of the behavior that led to the Communications Decency Act's passage, that meant taking reasonable precautions to ensure that pages containing questionable content (especially sexually explicit content or other, damaging, speech) were sufficiently well marked and sufficiently well secured that minors and non-consenting adults would not easily blunder into them.

Since we loudly proclaimed (and continue to proclaim) that we will not do this ourselves, the government has made it painful for us to continue to shirk our responsibility.

Having read the Act, it looks to me as though the protested portions of this bill restrict free speech no more than a "you must be 18 to see this movie" sign restricts free speech at a theater. It is not censorship to take reasonable precautions to prevent someone from being harmed by our free speech. Under the Act, providing such precautions is a defense against conviction.

The simplest precaution, a precaution that permits (perhaps even encourages) "free speech" is the addition of a tag that would identify questionable speech and allow parents to screen it from their children and non-consenting adults to screen it from their viewing. My browser currently tells me every time I am about to send unsecure data to a server. It also warns me when I am about to receive a file type that it does not know how to handle. Since the technology exists for these things, a way obviously also exists for senders to flag speech they think might be offensive. Thus tagged, receiving browsers could warn the recipient and allow them to skip or view the tagged content. Thus tagged, "reasonable precautions" would have been taken to prevent non-consensual viewing and the senders would be provided a defense against conviction under the Communications Act. Note that the sender still spoke freely and at last the recipients could protect themselves from injury.

We have had obscenity, libel, slander, and other laws to protect people from injurious speech for many years now. Providers of forms of speech that can be injurious to others are often plainly marked (e.g., "adult" bookstores and the movie rating system). While the possibility exists that some forms of speech that are fairly freely accessible off the Net would be more tightly controlled on the Net, I am hard pressed to think of one that does not provide an effective way for people to choose what they will see or hear, a way that is not currently readily available on the Net.

And so, this page will not be black.

See for yourself what's in the Communications Decency Act.

Return to the Responsible Speech page.