IP: Ireland closes Net speech summit (fwd)

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

From: Stanton McCandlish <mech () eff org>




Incidentally, the main quoted piece in this joint statement was written by
yours truly:


"Government-imposed censorship, overregulation, or service
provider liability will do nothing to keep people from obtaining
material the government does not like, as most of it will be on
servers in another country," the policy statement says. "Such
restrictions would, however, make Ireland, like any other
jurisdiction that goes too far, a very hostile place for network
development or any other high-tech industry and investment.
Ireland should be looking to empower Irish people for the future
as the country enters the 21st century, not turning back to the
censorship and closed-mindedness of the 19th century." 


The statement is called a Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK) statement,
but is actually a Global Internet Liberty Campaign statement with a lot of
other sign ons. C-R C-L (UK) was just the principal author.


More statements of this sort will probably be coming out from GILC, on
various EU/EC/OECD positions and summits, and so forth, over the next few
weeks.




Dave Banisar typed:
> From gilc-plan () gilc org  Thu Jul 17 07:18:49 1997
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 10:10:40 -0400
Message-Id: <v03110700aff3d831da06@[204.91.138.250]>
From: Dave Banisar <banisar () epic org>
Subject: CNET: Ireland closes Net speech summit 
To: Global Internet Liberty Campaign <gilc-plan () gilc org>
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http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,12506,00.html?dtn.head


Ireland closes Net speech summit
By Jane Black
July 16, 1997, 4:30 p.m. PT


A United Kingdom cyberliberties group today was among the
first to make itself heard in the early stages of a debate in Ireland
over how to control smut on the Internet.


Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties U.K., an activist group
concerned with protecting freedom of speech and other rights for
Internet users, hopes that its comments will help lay the
foundation for a Net regulation policy that is being mounted by
the Irish government's Working Group on Illegal and Harmful
Use of the Internet.


The Irish debate over Net regulation follows the defeat of the
Communications Decency Act in the United States, which was
rejected by the Supreme Court at the end of June. In addition,
recent statistics show that Ireland is fast becoming a high-tech hot
spot: Close to half of the computers sold on the continent come
from Ireland, and observers don't expect a slowdown.


Coincidentally or not, the group's recommendations would avoid
many of the glitches that U.S. lawmakers encountered in trying to
justify the CDA. In its comments, Cyber-Liberties U.K. asks the
government working group to refrain from prosecuting service
providers for material on the Internet or requiring them to monitor
or control content; to rely on existing laws to prosecute crimes on
the Internet (such as the distribution of child pornography or
copyright infringement) rather than pass new laws or regulations
treating the new medium specially; and to avoid censorship but
advise on the use of filtering or blocking software.


"Government-imposed censorship, overregulation, or service
provider liability will do nothing to keep people from obtaining
material the government does not like, as most of it will be on
servers in another country," the policy statement says. "Such
restrictions would, however, make Ireland, like any other
jurisdiction that goes too far, a very hostile place for network
development or any other high-tech industry and investment.
Ireland should be looking to empower Irish people for the future
as the country enters the 21st century, not turning back to the
censorship and closed-mindedness of the 19th century."


The Irish Working Group on Illegal and Harmful Use of the
Internet was established by the Irish government to identify the
nature and extent of detrimental use of the Internet and to
prioritize Net issues with particular reference to child
pornography in the short term. Today is the last day it will accept
comments on these issues.


The issues Ireland faces are hardly new. In Germany, for
example, the parliament just passed legislation that sets standards
regarding child pornography on the Internet. The so-called
Information and Communications Services Act is set to take effect
there on August 1.


Other countries have chosen to censor information completely.
Since last summer, Singapore has required operators of Internet
companies--including service providers, cybercafes, and
organizations with sites that provide political and religious
information about Singapore--must register with the government.
Last September, Chinese officials issued a blanket ban on about
100 Web sites ranging from U.S. newspapers and sexually
explicit sites to services offering information on Taiwan and
Hong Kong.











--
Stanton McCandlish                                           mech () eff org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                           Program Director
http://www.eff.org/~mech    +1 415 436 9333 x105 (v), +1 415 436 9333 (f)
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