The American Civil Liberties Union has joined a battle over whether a parent can force a public library to censor Internet access for all patrons just to control her own child's Net use.
The case involves the Livermore Public Library. A parent identified as Kathleen R. argued the library's open Net access policy creates a public nuisance. A lower court dismissed her suit, but she has since filed an amended complain also charging libraries have "a constitutional obligation" to protect minors from pornography by blocking all patrons' Net access.
"As the (lower) court recognized, it is no more legal for a parent to compel a library to censor the Internet than it is for the government to do so," says staff attorney Ann Brick of the Northern California ACLU, which filed the friend-of-the-court brief with the 9th Circuit Court. "The Livermore library's policy enables each family to be sure that its children use the Internet in a manner that is consistent with its own values, without imposing those values on other families."
A federal appeals court in Virginia, last year, held a library's blocking software use violated free speech because it blocked not just porn sites but sites of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner as well as the Maryland affiliate of the American Association of University Women, among other non-porn sites.
"The Livermore Library Board recognizes, as the Virginia Library Board did not, that requiring the use of blocking software in libraries creates, rather than solves, constitutional problems," says ACLU national staff attorney Ann Beeson, who argued the Virginia case. "If Kathleen R. has her way, the Internet will become as bland and homogenized as daytime television."
