FC: Judge Jackson rips Gates; Sup. Court nixes Virginia porn appeal

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17876,00.html

MS Judge Rips Gates Again
Associated Press

8:15 a.m. Jan. 8, 2001 PST
WASHINGTON -- The federal judge who ordered Microsoft split in two last 
year compares Bill Gates to Napoleon, even musing that the company founder 
should be required to write a book report on him and said Microsoft 
executives behave like children. "I think he has a Napoleonic concept of 
himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed 
success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses," Judge Thomas 
Penfield Jackson says of Gates in the Jan. 8 issue of The New Yorker. [...]

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Background on Virginia case:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17876,00.html
http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/censor/censor.html#virginia

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/010801.ZOR.html

MONDAY, JANUARY 8, 2001
APPEAL -- SUMMARY DISPOSITION
00-862 VIRGINIA V. RENO, ATTY. GEN., ET AL.
The judgment is affirmed.

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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010108/ts/court_pornography_dc_1.html

   Monday January 8 11:39 AM ET
   Supreme Court Lets Stand Computer Anti-Porn Law

   By James Vicini

   WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court
   rejected on Monday a free-speech challenge by six university
   professors to a Virginia law that bars public employees from using
   state computers to access sexually explicit material on the Internet.

   The professors argued the law violated the constitutional First
   Amendment-based academic freedom rights of university scholars and the
   rights of other public employees engaged in legitimate, work-related,
   intellectual inquiry.

   The law, adopted in 1996, barred about 101,000 state employees,
   including faculty members, librarians and other researchers at state
   institutions, from using their state computers to access sites with
   sexually explicit content.

  Sexually explicit is defined as any depiction or description of
   ``sexual excitement,'' ``sexual conduct,'' or ``a lewd exhibition of
   nudity.''

   Professors or other state employees must get written permission from
   their agency heads before accessing sexually explicit material.

   [...]

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