Democratizing Effect of the Internet

[rthstewart]

A long time ago, in galaxy far, far, away, in the dark times, before Google, these were the days when Lucasfilm, Paramount, and Ten Thirteen (we assumed) amassed armies of tony LA and New York copyright lawyers armed with C&Ds who browsed Usenet groups and the burgeoning web looking for sites to shut down.  This was in the days before ff.net and fan fiction dwelt in this ambiguous place where we all thought it was probably fair use, but we didn't have The Organization for Transformative Works to tell us these things.  We had a whole running gag in one group I ran with taking lines from Star Wars and twisting them about:

• "Copyright infringement ain't like dustin crops, boy."
• "Aren't you a little short for a copyright lawyer."
• “Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and copyright infringement."
• "I am an infringer, like my father before me."
• "Before the dark times, before the copyright lawyers."

But, I digress (I'm feeling nostalgic because on Other Fandom Friends are all down working the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando).

During this period, in 1995-1996, the U.S. Congress passes this funky piece of legislation known as the Communications Decency Act that sought to regulate and prohibit "indecent" material on the Internet, with criminal sanctions:
 

"any person in interstate or foreign communications who" ... "by means of a telecommunications device,""knowingly ... makes,creates, or solicits" and "initiates the transmission" of "any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication which is obscene or indecent, knowing that the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age," "shall be criminally fined or imprisoned."
.

Scary stuff for any content provider.  The issue wasn't the "obscene" part -- it was the "indecent."  What the heck was indecent?  Well, practically everything, prison rape discussion boards, websites devoted to the raising awareness of female genital mutiliation, AIDS awareness.  Certainly your average porn-ficathon.  A whole slew of groups sued, claiming it was an improper intrusion by the government into speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  A three judge panel heard the case and it was one of those things that once you read it, you never really forget it.  I was musing on it in the previous entry and min023  asked for the link.  So, here it is.  The opinion is sort of "cute" in it careful explanation of the Internet as it existed in 1995.  It was eventually affirmed by the US Supreme Court.  The best, most ringing, and quotable parts, were by Judge Dalzell,
 

Both Tornillo and Turner recognize, in essence, that the cure for market dysfunction (government-imposed, content-based speech restrictions) will almost always be worse than the disease. Here, however, I am hard-pressed even to identify the disease. It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country--and indeed the world--has yet seen. The plaintiffs in these actions correctly describe the "democratizing" effects of Internet communication: individual citizens of limited means can speak to a worldwide audience on issues of concern to them. Federalists and Anti-Federalists may debate the structure of their government nightly, but these debates occur in newsgroups or chat rooms rather than in pamphlets. Modern-day Luthers still post their theses, but to electronic bulletin boards rather than the door of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche.  More mundane (but from a constitutional perspective, equally important) dialogue occurs between aspiring artists, or French cooks, or dog lovers, or fly fishermen.
...
Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide  conversation.  The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion. True it is that many find some of the speech on the Internet to be offensive, and amid the din of cyberspace many hear discordant voices that they regard as indecent. The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing: "What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos."