On the Child Online Protection Act (COPA)
Libraries are now heavily associated with the fight against the Patriot Act, but there’s another library battle that most people aren’t even aware of. Garnering far less attention than the Patriot Act, COPA slips not only into the debate on civil liberties, but also, arguably, into the arena of “family values”. The purpose of COPA is to keep kids from accessing pornographic websites. To do this, the government has proposed requiring sites with adult material to ask for identification proving that visitors are 18 or older. (Example identification includes a driver’s license or passport number.) Not surprisingly, critics argue that requiring identification violates adults’ civil rights.
Libraries definitely fall in the COPA critics’ camp, and I find myself sitting there with them. Why try to solve this problem with a regulatory solution when there is a technology solution available? We can monitor and block inappropriate content when kids are online – at home or at the library. Software, and I’m not just talking about Guardware here, has grown immensely more effective at contextual analysis of Internet content. In other words, we can keep out the bad stuff while letting in sites that talk about and show pictures dedicated to breast cancer awareness.
Parents are on board. According to a 2005 Pew research study, “Among parents with access to the internet, half (51%) said they installed a filter to prevent access to pornography, including 59% of parents with children old enough to be likely to access the internet on their own.
