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Mom Loses Livermore AppealThe California Court of Appeal agreed March 6 with a lower-court decision that the Livermore (Calif.) Public Library is not constitutionally obligated to offer blocking software on its public-access Internet terminals. Plaintiff Kathleen R. is the mother of a boy who downloaded sexually explicit images at the library on several occasions and printed them out at a relative’s home. “There is a crucial distinction between providing minors with harmful matter on the one hand, and maintaining computers where minors may obtain such matter, however easily, on the other,” the three-judge panel stated. “Provision of computer-transmitted obscenity to minors would contravene the library policy’s directives that computers be used for educational, informational, recreational, but not illegal, purposes,” but just because the library “does not supervise minors’ use of the Internet . . . does not imply that the library intends for minors to be exposed to obscenity,” the panel concluded. “If a librarian is personally providing pornography, that is a whole different situation,” plaintiff attorney Michael Millen told the Associated Press March 7, adding that “making it easy to access should also result in liability.” Posted March 12, 2001. |
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