introduction
Australian law
overseas law
bodies
texts
free speech
tools
offline
secrecy
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Free Speech and Online Content Regulation
This part of the Censorship guide
deals with free speech online. The final parts of the guide explore
censorship of the 'old' media and official secrets.
overviews
The EFF's John Perry Barlow famously remarked
that "in cyberspace the First Amendment is a local ordinance".
Of
course in practice we're not citizens of cyberspace, so local ordinances
matter, and in the US the Supreme Court has actively used free speech in
knocking down federal/state censorship legislation such as the CDA and
COPA.
Patrick Gary's Scrambling for Protection: The New Media & the
First Amendment (Pittsburgh, Uni of Pittsburgh Press 94) offers a
useful introduction to the US debate about free speech on the web.
The
recent Digital Technology Law Journal paper
by Michael Blakeney & Fiona Macmillan, Regulating Speech On The
Internet, considers law, technology and policy from an Australian
perspective.
Both are more insightful than the bouncy Sex, Laws & Cyberspace:
Freedom & Censorship on the Frontiers of the Online Revolution
(New York, Owl/Holt 97) by Jonathan Wallace & Mark Mangan, which has
a companion site.
A perspective on recent libertarian thinking in the US is provided by
David Rabban's Free Speech In Its Forgotten Years (Cambridge,
Cambridge Uni Press 97), considering the era before the ACLU.
Jonathan
Weinberg's 1997 paper
Rating the Net, in one of the better legal analyses of
filtering software and rating schemes, provides a succinct analysis of
the implications for free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union's 1997 statement
Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace
Burning? How Rating and Blocking Proposals May Torch Free Speech on the
Internet is a useful point of reference for the US.
In Australia the
EFA site has material on local
online free speech issues, less shrill than the Barlow-style
pronouncements of some of its supporters.
legislation
Freedom of speech is not a fundamental
right in the Australian constitution and attempts in 1942 and 1944 (the
latter involving a referendum) to enshrine it were unsuccessful. The
1973 Human Rights Bill, reflecting the 1966 International Covenant on
Civil & Political Rights, and recommendations of the 1985
Constitutional Commission for a Canadian-style Charter of Rights &
Freedoms also went nowhere.
George Williams, in Human Rights Under
The Australian Constitution (Melbourne, Oxford Uni Press 99) argues
that the "astonishingly low" support for the 1987 referendum
signals the end of attempts to enshrine freedom of speech through a
'bill of rights' amendment of the constitution.
The Blakeney &
Macmillan paper noted above deals with legislative protections as of
2000.
bibliographies
There's no definitive Australian
bibliography, online or in print, of freedom of speech.
Ralph McCoy's online
Freedom of the Press: An Annotated Bibliography is an
authoritative and comprehensive guide to several thousand books and
articles on freedom of the press. Its focus is on the US.
libraries
Free Access To Information &
Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) is a new
initiative from the library community, with an international focus.
next part
(filters and other
tools)
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